Strangers When We Meet
by sir rantsalot
Summary: Sometimes, the hardest part of getting to know someone is learning to be strangers. Features a grown-up, pragmatic Sarah and an exiled Jareth; heavy on character interaction and development, low on magic and high drama.
1. Chapter 1

The third time someone small, brown and lumpy popped out from under the driver's seat of her old Toyota, with a squeaky cry of "vive la resistance!", Sarah Williams gave up on the week being anything but weird. After all, it was only Tuesday, and she had thought she'd settled the "vive la resistance!" issue, whatever ithat/i was about (goblins, while forthcoming, seldom proved terribly articulate) back in July after they'd given themselves flour camouflage and stolen half her underwear for flags. But no, they'd forgotten about July, or decided the statute of limitations had run out, or something.

She pursed her lips. She narrowed her eyes. She sighed, wearily, and pinched the bridge of her nose. The little goblin whose torso protruded from under her upholstery, gnarled claws valiantly brandishing a pair of red satin underwear at the end of a long stick, pursed its lips, narrowed its eyes, sighed, and pinched the bridge of its nose right back at her. The imitation would have met with more success had the goblin not poked itself in the eye.

"Gahhh! Eyeses! Vive la resistance!" it cried, falling flailing out from under the seat, while Sarah picked up the stick and regarded it thoughtfully. She'd wondered where those underwear got to. With a wry smile, she removed them from said stick, put them in the glove compartment, and scooped up the goblin, which peered up at her with a look that aimed for worried innocence and landed squarely on guilt.

"You are a troublemaker."

"No'm not. 'm just a trouble ihelper/i." Worry shifted sharply into indignation; the goblin folded its knobby little arms and glared at her. She couldn't help laughing.

"Well, troublemaker or troublehelper, you need to stop stealing my things and popping out of things unexpectedly. That could be really dangerous, okay?"

"Dangerous?"

She peered down at its serious little face, screwed up in concentration, and fought back an affectionate smile. "Yeah, like playing hopscotch across the bog." The goblin gasped in horror. "Except that I'd get hurt too." Its eyes widened in horror. "And you'd never, ever get to see your chicken again."

"Oh no, Lady!" it wailed, hiding its face in its hands and peering at her in abject horror between its fingers. "Can't have that, oh no! I be good. I promise."

"You swear?"

"Yes, Lady."

"Cross your heart and hope to die?"

Whimpering, it nodded. "Cross my liver'n hope to die."

"…Close enough. Now, what's this resistance thing about?" It gave her the I'm Not Telling look – jaw jutting stubbornly, eyes narrowed in suspicion, feet planted, arms folded, head turned sharply aside to glare at some point in front of the toes; she'd seen it on her daughter more times than she could count – and mumbled unintelligibly into its shoulder.

"Hm? I'm afraid I didn't catch that."

"Said 'm not s'posed t'tell."

"Not even for a cookie?" The goblin glanced up at her, traitorous hope stirring in its eyes. "And a square of bubble wrap?"

Oh, glee! Oh, joy! Oh, terrible lack of any semblance of self-discipline! No goblin could resist the temptation of bubble wrap. To be fair, this one put up a valiant effort, for all of five seconds, by far the best she had seen after the reflexive reaction of clasped hands and bouncing up and down in excitement. At last, though, it sighed, clambered up her shoulder, and tugged her hair to bring her ear down to its mouth. Someday, she'd manage to teach them to iask/i about these things, but for now, she went along with it. Maybe it would give her the missing piece requisite to figuring out the damn bewildering resistance thing.

"We're not 'lowed t'have chickens in the castle no more!" She winced because goblins have no concept of whispering. The goblin nodded mournfully, eyes swimming with unshed tears, because it thought she winced in sympathy. "Not in the stairs room, not in the kitchen, not even in the throne room!"

"Because of the rebuilding?"

"No, no, that was iages/i ago, that was! Because kingy says so!"

"All right," she answered, thoughtfully, and ruffled its hair. It scowled up at her, its dignity offended.

"C'n I go now, Lady?"

"Don't you want your cookie and your bubble wrap?"

"Later. I don't like the metal bug." And with that, it vanished, leaving behind only a quiet ipop/i and a puff of glitter. Sarah sighed, turning the key in the ignition and pulling out of her parking space for the drive home. The goblin was a smart one, for a goblin, and it was right – the castle had been rebuilt twenty-five years ago, a decent span of time even by human standards, and eons by the standard of someone with the attention span of a cracked-out ferret.

Maybe Jareth had finally just snapped, not that she could blame him. She found herself wondering what had been the final straw. Maybe a chicken had shat in his hair.

The thing everyone forgot about barn owls – or maybe just liked to ignore, like the fact that dolphins murder baby porpoises and a bald eagle sounds sort of like a frog with something stuck in its throat – is that they don't make a nice, melodious "hoo, hoo." They don't go "hoo" at all. They make a sound roughly akin to that of the Wicked Witch of the West getting hit by a bus, a fact with which Sarah had become infinitely aware, thanks to the pair that roosted behind her house every spring.

This didn't keep it from startling her so badly she shot milk out her nose and all over the counter by the window. She squawked indignantly, hurriedly clapping a napkin to her face, and hastily went about mopping up the milk. A glance at the clock showed the time as five thirty in the afternoon, on a sunny September day – far too early for them to be up and about. Some long-buried root of unease furrowed about deep in her gut. Goblins and barn owls, oh my…

Chaos chose that moment to ensue. Sarah flailed back from the window as a torrent of black feathers whirled past, a wrathful blur of white hot on its heels. She leaned out the window, hands braced on either side of the kitchen sink, to watch as the crows escaped the narrow chasm between her house and her neighbour's and scattered to every point of the compass, leaving the poor dim-witted owl to flounder uncertainly after the nearest. In less time than it took her to count to thirteen, the birds had vanished into Portland's multitudinous trees.

She shook her head slowly and retreated back into the orderly chaos of her yellow-countered kitchen. Sooner or later, she'd figure out something to do about the crows, egg-thieves that they were. And the counters. Really, who the hell puts yellow linoleum counters in a Victorian home? Grumbling good-humouredly under her breath, she rinsed the glass out and put it in the dishwasher. Seven years ago anyone telling her that in the year 2010, she'd drink a glass of milk every day after work, would have won a gale of laughter. Jocelyn's pre-school years had changed that in a hurry; she'd spent a full year and a half refusing to do anything she didn't see Sarah do first. Fortunately, she'd had practice with goblins.

Goblins. She owed that one – Squawk? Squelch? Squeamish? – a cookie and bubble wrap, and where one came, more would soon follow. Soft on stocking-feet, she padded over to the fridge and peered inside, then frowned into the nigh-emptiness. Mustard was inot/i a viable substitute for cookies, even according to goblin tastes.

Well, she'd planned on running errands the next day – Saturday was grocery day, and Sunday laundry day – but, she supposed, she could get that over with early and have tomorrow to herself. A plan began to form, luminous and self-indulgent , at the back of her mind. She hurried back across the kitchen and once more reached out the window, earning an odd look from Mr. Phelps next door as she flailed her arm about. Grinning, she turned the flail into a wave, then ran to the foyer to put her shoes on, grab her keys, and all but skip out the front door, locking it behind her.

A moment later, she returned to pick up a cloth bag full of other cloth bags. If she was going to spoil herself with a trip to Whole Foods in the place of something more reasonably-priced, damned if she wasn't going to do it in proper style.

By the time she emerged, beaming and bearing one bag of deliciousness and three more of ingredients for more of the same, the magnificent day had transformed into a glorious evening, the deep blue Northwest sky radiant with a gibbous moon and high, thin clouds, foreshadowing the rainy winter. The summer had been a hot one; the pavement held the day's heat and, after a few blocks' walk and a moment's consideration, Sarah darted a glance in each direction, then slipped her sandals off her feet and into one of the bags. They could keep the canned tomatoes company. She wanted to feel the earth under her feet.

Her toes, tanned from a summer of sandals and still tipped in scraps of battered red polish from her last evening with Jocelyn in January, hugged the pavement as she walked. The rest of her all but floated. She took a deep breath of air and let it out on a laugh which carried her with it, skipping, heedless of her bags, the short ends of her red pixie cut tickling her ears, spinning at street-corners and, fleetingly, wishing she'd thought to wear a skirt.

Though she mostly circumvented the bit of downtown between the closest Whole Foods and her house, it spilled over a bit, complete with the requisite hipsters, drunks, and homeless folk. Reluctantly, she tugged her shoes back on. As cities went, Portland was safe, but stepping on broken glass sucks spectacularly no matter iwhere/i one does it, and besides, the streets thronged with college students indulging in a last fit of depravity before classes resumed, and she didn't fancy being trodden on.

Or bumped into. She caught her balance with an indignant "Excuse me!" – no, she would inot/i apologize for having grocery bags, not when the girl had blundered into her without looking anywhere save at her cell phone – and took a step back. Her foot met something soft, and she hurriedly lifted her foot and glanced down at the pale hand she'd almost crushed.

She let out a ragged sigh. Damn, she'd thought that might be it, and now she felt obliged to see if the – she glanced at the hand again – man was in trouble, or just passed out drunk. She set her bags down by the side of the walkway and knelt, peering under the bushes in which he had, apparently, taken shelter. From her vantage point, she couldn't tell much, save his exceedingly shabby state of dress. Probably homeless, then.

"Damn, damn, and damn…please don't be dead." She felt a bit ill, suddenly, and plopped unceremoniously onto her bum as her knees went to jelly. God dammit, what do you do if you find a corpse? Her mind raced. Call the police? What if they thought she did it? Why hadn't anyone else noticed him? His hand was right out there…

A breath she hadn't realized she'd held tore its ragged way out of her as her fingers found a pulse in his wrist. She sat for a moment, staring blindly at her fingertips on the pale flesh, letting her breathing return to normal as she concentrated on sensation. His heartbeat under her hand, too faint to be healthy. His thin skin, almost searing hot. His bones, thin as a bird's, defining the width of a wrist with little to it isave/i for skin and bone.

She took another deep, steadying breath and closed her eyes for a moment. So, not dead, thankfully, but ill or hurt. Well, she'd take what she could get. She let the breath out carefully and opened her eyes, which fell on his hand.

Evidently she had been the only one to almost step on him, the key word being 'almost.' Apparently, everyone else had just gone ahead and done so. His little finger lay at a sickening angle and his palm was a stigmata of bruises and blood and the white edges of bone. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, feeling more than a bit ill. Portlanders were usually more considerate than that. Come to think of it, nobody had even paused to ask what she was doing.

Suddenly angry, she snagged the arm of a passing businessman.

"Hey! There's a man under here unconscious. Help me help him!"

The man blinked at her, too astonished for anger, and then tugged his arm sharply out of her hand. He didn't leave, though; good man, she thought, relaxing a little as he leaned down and looked under the bushes. Her stomach fell when he stared back at her, brow creased and mouth a bracket of disapproval.

"Don't you think it's a bit early to be that drunk, lady?"

"I'm not drunk." Temper, Sarah, she chided herself. Snapping at him won't help anyone. "Can't you see him?"

Some amalgam of astonishment, irritation, and pity crossed the man's face. "No, ma'am, I can't say I do." And, just like that, he walked off. Sarah bit down on her lower lip and a mouthful of profanity, bile pressed against the back of her throat and eyes stinging with angry tears. She reached out a hand to touch the man's arm and cursed viciously under her breath as the hand shook. His coat lay stiff and sticky under her hand. She resolutely didn't think about that as she took a firm handful of it and tugged him closer until she could get her other hand on his other shoulder and, carefully, roll him onto his back.

It proved remarkably easy. He weighed next to nothing; she'd had more difficulty budging Jocelyn when she fell asleep on the couch. She resolved to delay thinking about that, too. For now, she had him to take care of.

A tooth broke the skin on her lip as she rolled him, staring hard at her white-knuckled grip on his jacket as she started the motion, and registering a pale, bloodied blur of face as she transferred her other hand to cup the base of his skull, keeping him from knocking his head against the sidewalk. Blood crusted against her fingertips, under tangled hair of an indistinguishable colour.

She extricated her hand carefully and, absently, wiped it against her jeans. An irrelevant thought crossed her mind; thank god she ihadn't/i worn a skirt. She let out a shivering laugh, ignoring the odd look a passerby gave her, and looked down at her foundling.

For the second time that day, she went still for a long moment. This time, she broke the pause with a wry smile as anxiety settled into something like disappointment.

"Should have known it was you…" Her voice sounded a bit distant to her. She shook her head slowly. One of her hands had reached out, of its own accord, to graze the sharp angle of a familiar cheekbone. "Damn. Oh well. Nothing for it."

Evidently, in the last five minutes, she'd forgotten how light he was; she almost overbalanced, compensating for weight that wasn't there, as she stood up cradling him against her chest like a sleeping child. He stirred a bit, tucking his face into her shoulder, and she pulled a face. This was going to be interesting. At least his lightness meant she could, however awkwardly, crouch down to pick up her bags, four handles in each hand, one hand under his knees and the other around his shoulders. She probably looked like an utter lunatic, a professional turned bag lady, Agnes with a thing for half-dead vagrants.

The last stoplight before her house turned red just as she approached. She cursed again, not even under her breath. Cursing seemed to be the order of the night, and "light, for a human(ish) being" did not equate to "easy to carry for a mile and a half."

She glared disgruntledly down at him, then blinked as her brain, finally rebooting, fired a thought at her.

"If you're here," she muttered, one eye narrowing, "who the hell is keeping them from letting chickens in the Escher room?" And then the light changed, and she hurried across the street, groceries whacking awkwardly against her hips.


	2. Chapter 2

Sarah closed the front door with her butt, unceremoniously deposited the bags, and leaned against the door, head resting against the smooth wood grain, for a minute. It took an exertion of will to peel herself off, but peel she did, and staggered, trailed by a litany of language that would make Blackbeard blush, to her guest room. She elbowed the light on, smacked her funny bone against the wall in the process, reeled over to the bed, set her burden down with rather more care than she had the bags, shook her arms out, and glared at him.

Well, not at _him_, not really; at the situation at large, but it's not really possible to glare at something conceptual, so she settled for glaring at Jareth. He, being unconscious, did not glare back. She shook herself out of that after a moment, marched resolutely back to the foyer, and put away the refrigerated and frozen groceries. If her unexpected guest hadn't expired on the walk home, he'd last the time it took to put away milk, eggs, ice cream and…shit. She'd forgotten the cookie dough.

"Hell, damn, fuck, shit, ass, hell, fuck, damn, wait I already said that," she muttered, a staccato marching beat, one syllable per step, on her way to the bathroom. First aid kit. Disinfectant. Antibiotics, left over from Jocelyn's ear infection. Painkillers, from when Sarah had broken her arm five years ago, damn, she hoped they were still good. Dental floss for stitches, she'd heard it worked well for that, unless – she checked, hurriedly; good, this was unflavoured. She had thoughtlessly washed a personal area with mint soap once, and shuddered to think what mint would feel like in raw flesh. There, there, and there, and she swooped it all up, deposited it quickly in the guest room, and forced herself not to run to the third of four bedrooms, which served not as a bedroom at all but a project room.

Feverish rummaging produced what she sought; her yardstick, three rulers, and her sharpest needle. She swallowed hard, caught her breath, took them back to the guest room, set them down beside the items from the bathroom, and swore again. This trip produced a bucket of water – thank god it came warm from the hose, heated by the day's sun – and an extra-large garbage bag, which she sliced up the seams and, finally done swearing, stretched out on the bed beside Jareth, who, to her total lack of surprise, hadn't so much as twitched.

He did stir a little as she moved him. She heard his breath hitch, and muttered an apology despite the near-certainty that he couldn't hear her. The bag barely crinkled under his slight weight. Sarah pulled another face, retrieved the scissors from the nightstand, and set about finding out what she could do.

His clothes, all three to five layers of them – their excessive raggedness, and the blood gluing them together, rendered counting all but impossible – wound up in a heap on the ground, to be cleaned up after, and half his hair followed. She would think about the implications of three to five layers of hobo clothes on the Goblin King sometime later, she informed herself, after she finished doing something about the body under the clothes.

She could just about count his vertebrae from the front, and probably could have used his ribcage for a xylophone. She couldn't do anything about that. Scabs crusted his left side, and bruises blackened it; closer inspection showed, to her queasy surprise, deep lacerations, as if from some large animal's claws. Her hand shook a little as she held her fingers up to one set; they were spaced a bit too widely for a hand the size of hers, and a few of them showed stark glimpses of bone underneath.

"Those are going to need stitches," she informed herself, and blinked as the words cut off the distressing squeaking sound that had been bothering her. Irritation rising, she realized she had been whimpering. Damn, damn, damn, that wasn't going to help – not that she could probably help much, either; even untrained, she recognized those lacerations as serious, and those were just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Well, nobody else could _see_ him, which meant she had to do what she could. Inhale, exhale. He might not make it, but if she did her best, then at least it wouldn't be on her conscience.

She cleaned out the scrapes and the morbid cuneiform of wounds. She stitched the cuts and taped gauze over the expanse – it looked, she decided, almost like a burn, like he'd been dragged on asphalt or something, and when she moved his right arm something grated, which a moment's investigation proved to be the collarbone, and what the hell was she supposed to do about that, now?

And it had scratches over it too, so she stitched those as well, and one thing led to another, until she found herself sitting on the edge of the bed, shaking not with nerves but with exhaustion, staring at a thin figure that resembled a mummy more than anything else. She'd never put a dislocated joint back in place or set a bone before, and she never wanted to repeat the experience. Or stitches. Stitches, she had decided, horrified her; so did the wet scraping crunch of realigning broken bones; but neither bothered her half as much as the cuts – what the hell made cuts like that? – or the grey veining spreading up from anything that broke the skin.

Slowly she looked down at herself. She'd started out in blue jeans and a green tank top; they were all black now. Black? She blinked hard. Shouldn't they be red or brown? But no, black they remained. Perplexed, she pulled up a hem of her shirt, sniffed it, and wrinkled her nose. _Not_ a normal blood smell, not…Looking back at the unconscious figure, she caught her breath, a lifetime's myths and fairy tales running through her mind.

Black blood, where it met with oxygen. Okay. And the veining, the – infection? Poison? – had a sick reddish cast to it, like rust. Cities were full of iron. Some supernatural creatures, like the sidhe of Celtic lore, were said to be allergic to iron.

If they were allergic to iron, then their blood couldn't contain it, and college zoology had taught her, along with how to stretch a research paper without fucking with font sizes and how not to light a Bunsen burner, that octopi have copper-based blood, with oxygen bonding to molecules of copper rather than iron. Sarah blinked once more, closely scrutinizing her guest's face, ignoring the clumsily stitched cuts across a scraped cheek. Yes, his lips looked distinctly blue. And his blood oxidized black. Silver.

"Shit," she breathed, but she said it like a revelation, and then she _ran_ – ran first to her room for the little tray of jewelry on her sideboard and then to the kitchen, for the coffee grinder.

"Sorry, Andrew," accompanied the plink of a necklace her ex-husband had given her, the only piece of real silver she knew she had. The machine snarled to life, making her jump, and suddenly, to her immense surprise, she found herself crying in hard gulping sobs that left her leaning hard against the ugly yellow countertop, weeping for…for the amiable but final dissolution of her marriage? For the daughter who spent half her year down in San Diego with her dad? For the near-stranger lying on death's doorstep in her guest room?

She regained control quickly enough, turned off the coffee grinder, peered inside, sneezed into the crook of her arm, and tried again. A lump of silver lay there, surrounded by fine gratings. Calmer, now, she heated a cup of chicken broth and stirred in a pinch of silver shavings, trying to think of the relative size of an iron supplement. Damn, that chicken broth was supposed to be for supper, too, and…damn, she'd forgotten all _about_ supper.

Well, she could take care of that in a bit. The mug found a home on the nightstand; the poor disemboweled, bloodied plastic bag joined the pile of Things To Be Cleaned Up Afterwards, and, carefully, carefully, she pulled blankets up over the limp figure on the bed. He formed a sickeningly small lump therein, until she slipped an arm behind him and propped him against her to enlist gravity's aid in getting some of the broth and with it, the silver, down him with a teaspoon. Quite without her permission, her hand had resumed shaking; if he hadn't proved totally unresisting, more than half of it would have ended up _on_ him rather than in him. It didn't help that, the few times he stirred, he tried to hide against her.

As it was, cleanup from Operation Chicken Broth occupied a good (for a given value of 'good') fifteen minutes, and getting the mess of ex-clothes and bloodied hair off the floor, and the floor itself cleaned, another half an hour. Finally, hands on hips, she surveyed her work.

The room looked a bit as if it had been hit by a tornado. The bed was rumpled. Jareth, thankfully, looked a bit less like a corpse. One more thing – no, two more things – and she could go to _bed_, goblins be damned. Squelch or Squarp or whoever it was could get its cookie and bubble wrap the next day.

It had been years since she'd used the baby monitor for Jocelyn, but she kept it in her nightstand, in case the child fell ill. She turned the little monitor on and set it on the windowsill above the guest bed, and, taking the other half of the unit with her, headed for the washing machine, pulling her shirt off as she went. If it made a satisfying thunk into the washer, she was too tired to notice, or to lament the cool air on her bare legs as her pants followed.

In her underwear, Sarah Williams stumbled back to her bedroom. The dryer could wait. The cookies could wait. Fucking _everything_ could wait. She was asleep before she hit the covers.

"Hey! Hey! Lady! Lady, wake _up_!"

"In a minute, Jo…you. You aren't Jocelyn." She ached. God did she ever ache. She cracked one eye open and peered over her shoulder at the earnest little face staring at her. She ached, she'd passed out face-down on top of her coverlet, and the goblin from her car had taken a seat on _her_ seat. Damn it all, the only one allowed to sit on her ass was her. "Hey, you."

"Cookies?"

"Yes," Sarah sighed, shedding not one but three goblins as she rolled over and sat up, scrubbing sleep from her eyes with a forefinger. "Say your magic word."

Three gnarled faces stared up at her. Three pairs of eyes widened in dismay. Three voices chorused "Pleeeeeease?"

"Of course." They followed her eagerly into the kitchen, either refraining from comment upon the white plastic monitor she snagged along the way or, more likely, just not noticing. She breathed another silent curse at having forgotten the cookie dough, gave them an extra square of bubble wrap to make up for it, and departed to take a shower. Rearranging half of someone's skeleton made for hard work, sponge baths really aren't sufficient for removal of blood, and she felt gross as well as sore. A shower could come neither soon enough, nor, apparently, hot enough.

She leaned back into the water like a plant to sunlight, squeezing her eyes shut as she stuck her shampoo-lathered head back under the faucet. Three scrubs and she still felt icky. A crash issued from the living room – goblins are much like children, and Jocelyn had been a tomboy since she'd been anything but an infant, but even the hardiest Tonka truck only stands up to so much abuse.

Reluctantly, she rinsed off, scrubbed herself dry far more roughly than any maternal figure in the history of the world would advise, threw her clothes on and hurried out to the living room to…be hit in the forehead with a plastic tire. She caught it reflexively as it fell and look up at the goblins, eyebrows raising.

"All right, guys. Remember the rules?"

"That Is A Shoe, Don't Eat It?"

"Pancakes Are For Eating, Not Wearing?"

"It Isn't A Slingshot, No Matter What?"

"Nope."

"No? Keep going! Keep going!"

"Put Things Back Where They Belong?"

"Warmer," she sighed.

"Warmer? Lady wants it warmer! Go put it in the beepy box!"

"No! Guys, no, that was a figure of speech."

"Lady, whossa figgeruvspee-"

"Hush!" She half-groaned, half laughed. "Remember: If you break something…"

"If we breaks something," five voices – the thing with goblins is that if you leave them alone, they multiply – chorused dejectedly, "we haves to go home."

Sarah raised an eyebrow sharply. They stared at her, slowly drooping. One of them opened its mouth to speak.

"Well?"

Its mouth clapped shot. One of its companions looked soulful at her. She raised her other eyebrow, and they disappeared with a disconsolate pop, leaving her to check in on their misplaced monarch and make coffee and breakfast, in that order, unfortunately. The monitor had woken her a few times during the night, to the sound of labored breathing, but fortunately never to silence, and she was pleased to note his lips had almost entirely gone back to a colour not normally associated with corpses.

Remembering how warm he'd been the day before, she put a hand to his forehead, and almost jumped back when he leaned into it. This time, she knew the quiet whimper wasn't her, and felt a bit bad for ranking "coffee later" as an unfortunate matter. In the grand scheme of things, it didn't even merit a blip. She sat a bit grudgingly on the edge of the bed to check him over; she didn't know if he actually did look a bit better, or if she was just deluding herself. Either way, she changed a few bandages and washed another antibiotic down his throat with the last of the water, which proved more problematic than last time, because, though he didn't stir again, he was shivering hard.

She piled another couple of blankets on him before she left to make breakfast, and had to laugh at the tiny lump he made in the bed. Poor thing. She was probably a horrible person for laughing at that, but what else was she supposed to do? Freak out about something she was doing her best to fix? Much like snapping at the man she'd waylaid yesterday, that wouldn't help anyone at all.

Breakfast was scrambled eggs, an apple, and coffee, for her, and more broth for him. She noted with concern that he was still shivering, which confirmed her suspicion that his temperature was not normal for a whatever-he-was. He half-woke, though, as she spooned the last bit of silver-spiked broth down his throat, and flinched violently away from her. If he'd had more strength, he would have run into the headboard.

She caught him reflexively and held him protectively against her while he hid his face against her shoulder. It caught her off guard; she'd spoken to him, what, five times before? Nowhere near enough to know a person well, but he'd seemed more together then. Then again, something unpleasant had obviously happened, and if he was thinking straight, she was Theodore Roosevelt, which she knew for a fact as bullshit.

"Hey…hey, it's okay." This, however disconcerting, she knew what to do with. Amazing, the things one learns from having children. She stroked his hair slowly and gently and hummed under her breath until he stilled, one hand clinging to the front of her shirt. If he'd been in his right mind, it would have earned him a glare that had reacquainted lesser men with the charming childhood habit of wetting themselves.

It was the hand she'd almost crushed yesterday, pale and thin and heavily bandaged. She disentangled it gently, placing it on the blankets and covering it with hers. Something in the sensation jarred her; moving her hand, she realized what it was.

Someone had taken his gloves.

Suddenly seething with rage on his behalf, she clenched her other hand into a fist so tight her palm would bear four red crescents til sundown. Whatever else had happened to him could have been accidental, could _still_ be accidental, but either someone had deliberately taken them or he had for some reason mislaid them and as far as she knew, he _always _wore them.

As far as she knew? She growled under her breath, shaking her head sharply in frustration. She didn't know, though, that was the thing. She'd hardly talked to him. He was a stranger, and she realized she'd been stroking her thumb lightly along the back of his hand, but it wasn't the back anymore, because his hand and turned to wrap loosely around hers.

Her throat tightened in empathy. She wrapped her other hand around his, and almost immediately unwrapped it, blinking incredulously at the little indents in the heel of her palm. Astonished, she turned his hand and gently uncurled the clinging fingers. At the tip of each there curled a wicked black claw. Something dull caught her eye, at the end of one. It was with a sick feeling that she removed the clot, horribly certain what it was even before she sniffed it. Shuddering, she pinched it into a tissue and threw it in the garbage and, perhaps in some hopeless wish that the sizes would not match up, looked closely from his hand to the gouges on his face, the gouges that matched the lacerations crisscrossing any damage that had broken his skin.

"I think," she announced, after a long moment, "that I am going to go throw up now."


	3. Chapter 3

She didn't throw up after all, which honestly surprised her a little. Long since had she given up theatrics, but giving up theatrics did not require sacrificing natural, sane human reaction. Still, she supposed she'd learned a lot from cleaning up after messy diapers, stomach bugs, and gashed foreheads, and so instead of bowing to the porcelain throne, she cleaned the kitchen, vacuumed the house – her guest did not stir at the noise, and, worried, she checked his pulse again – and did the rest of the laundry.

After that, at what would ordinarily count as lunch time, she'd recovered her appetite enough to finish her breakfast, before looking in on Jareth again and departing for what shopping she hadn't accomplished yesterday. The goblins would not relent on the cookies, and besides, cookies appealed to her too; she needed to pick up vacuum bags; she knew she'd need more medical supplies; and she felt she owed herself a new tank top, after the one she wore on her walk yesterday had proven unsalvageable.

At the store (thank god for Fred Meyer and its habit of having everything ever, so long as you didn't care if it was generic) she earned odd looks for speed-walking down the aisles. She didn't care, loath as she remained to leave her house, unsupervised, with a possibly dying (former?) Goblin King in her guest room and an alarming potential for invasion from his unruly (ex?) subjects. As usual, self-checkout proved a bad decision, and by the time she escaped, she found herself perilously close to making a habit of four-letter mantras.

"Not going to do that," she muttered, making a bee-line for her car, "you get Jocelyn back in a month and you do not want to teach her to cuss."

When she dropped two bags in the process of unlocking the car, she reconsidered this. A particularly vicious snarl accompanied the thump of bags, thankfully devoid of breakables, into her back seat. Another curse, this time of satisfaction, greeted the welcome roar of the engine, and a victorious "take that, bitches," heralded her emergence from the parking lot.

Five minutes later, a low, fierce "fuck" accompanied a remarkably well-planned-out U-turn to take her back to the shop that had just caught her eye. The sign had snagged her attention almost before she read the words; it proclaimed "Let It Bead," and as the door chimed shut behind her, she glimpsed a glimmer of silver and hope turned a backflip among her insides.

Upon closer inspection, walls and shelves of rainbows greeted her eyes, lit from above by white track-lights against green beams. Above the rainbow-festooned wall to her right hung five metal masks. Their curling horns spiraled upward above beautifully wrought otherworldly faces, empty eye-sockets staring at her. In twenty-five years, she'd paid the crystal ballroom no more attention than any other odd teenage memory – standing outside the school's back doors, kissing Mark and over his shoulder watching Tasha walk by, imagining kissing her instead – but the sight of them, now, made her a bit queasy.

Karen had arachnophobia, which Sarah had at first found contemptible. Later, when distance had lent her perspective, she'd asked, and discovered that the otherwise efficient woman found spiders as much fascinating as horrifying. The comparison had bemused her at the time. Now, as she wrenched her gaze away from the empty eyes on the wall, she thought she knew what Karen meant.

"Hey, may I help you?"

The voice made her start more than she'd like to admit. She whirled to the left and shot the woman behind the glass counter an apologetic smile. "Yeah, actually, I'm looking for some silver beads for a sick guest who has an interest in them."

"Good, one of our specialties is sterling silver. Do you know what she's looking for?"

"Not really, I just know he likes silver." So far, so good. "Maybe an assortment?"

"Okay. Our silver is over here; if you have any questions, ask me. Otherwise, I'll ring you up when you're done."

"Thanks." She meant it, too, though not for the reasons the friendly woman might think. Thank you, she thought, for not seeing through me. Thank you for not calling me on my bullshit. I'm sorry I'm going to put your gorgeous beads in a coffee grinder.

She paid quietly, simultaneously hopeful and subdued, regretting that she couldn't put the pretty things to their proper use, and drove home only slightly more quickly than her normal pace. It would be…well, not okay, that asked too much, but no worse than she left it. It had to be. She couldn't have left anyone with it. Nobody else could see him.

As before, she didn't linger over putting away her things, instead hurrying back to the guest room. Reason could only hold so long and worry clawed at the back of her throat, only to plummet, carrying everything else with it.

The bed lay empty. That was the first thing she noticed. Then came the silver-and-black bedding – god, oh god, it had been light green before – and the smears on the walls and bile rose through the gouges worry had left, stinging terrified tears from her eyes. Feverishly and irrationally, she checked the bed again – he was so thin, barely visible under the blankets, he could still be there, curled at the end or half-hidden under the pillows or something – until something pale caught her eye in the corner of the room, huddled between the bed and the wall.

"Oh, god." She didn't realize she'd said it aloud, didn't realize she'd crossed the room until she'd vaulted over the bed and knelt before him, as she never had when he'd been whole and powerful. The narrow space certainly provided no room to position herself beside him, and indeed barely gave her space for leverage enough to pry the claws out of the shredded flesh of his arm.

"Oh, Jesus _fuck_." A hard swallow barely washed down bile. She could see bone, and, as yesterday, resorted to talking herself through. "Okay. You definitely don't have room to get him on the bed from here…get on the bed yourself and pull. Christ I hope the cloth holds, Andrew wore that shirt for _years_…"

The shirt held. So, despite her most unreasonable unvoiced fear, did he. She had no _idea_ what to do with severed arms – resort to meat pies, a la Mrs. Lovett? She stifled a hysterical laugh at that, slicing Andrew's old shirt off to grant herself access to the ghastly hamburger of Jareth's side. For once, she didn't swear. Keeping her mouth shut suddenly seemed very important. She didn't want to think about what vomit would do to open wounds.

Morbidly, today's work proved quicker. It helped, in a horrible, sickening way, to work on flesh so ruined; she couldn't stitch what wouldn't hold the stitches. She kept having to blink away tears, which complicated things a bit, but she couldn't hold it against herself. People trained for years for this sort of thing, and worked with nurses and assistants to help, and, she had a terrible feeling, would probably lose him anyway, and what the hell would she do with the body?

"You owe me," she informed me, tucking him back into a fresh set of bedclothes, "if you live, and I have no idea what I'm gonna do if you don't. Bury you in the back yard, I guess…Maybe I'll get a pig." She laughed shakily. "Can you even keep pigs in Portland?"

On her way to the garage, she decided that yes, you could. People had pot-bellied pigs for pets, didn't they? By the time she found the heavy leather gardening gloves, she realized she wouldn't have time to give the animal the attention it deserved, so Jareth would just have to live. That settled that.

Wincing internally at what it would probably feel like, if he were to wake, she wrestled the gloves onto his hands. She silently, once more, thanked Jocelyn for the experience in dressing someone with no intention or capability of helping. The hand that had not been crushed kept trying weakly to curl around hers, which made it difficult in more ways than one. At least the stiff glove prevented that, once she had them on him, and she at last managed to stop crying long enough to feed him another antibiotic and painkiller and more broth.

Under the stinging stream of water as hot as she could take it, she contemplated just living in her swimsuit until she found claw-clippers up to the task of cutting back those talons. She briefly mused upon the hedge-clippers, as she toweled dry her hair, but a memory surfaced of cutting the quick on Merlin's claws, and the ensuing mess. No, he'd already lost enough blood and the situation freaked her out enough without hurting him more. Besides, the hedge-clippers were iron.

Claw-clippers it would have to be. Surely Petco would have something. Some people had really big dogs, after all, and goats seemed to be an increasing fad, and goat hooves needed trimming, right? Dressed now, she caught her reflection's gaze and laughed at the thought. The laughter came out almost normal, albeit tired. Petco it would be…

…tomorrow.

"Shit," she sighed, glaring at the clock on her counter, which read eight thirty PM. Evidently, reassembling ground whatever-Jareth-was took longer than she'd thought, and she hadn't even had dinner. She'd planned burgers; quick, easy, delicious served up with sharp cheddar on the ciabatta she'd bought yesterday, and a salad to the side, but the thought turned her stomach.

Instead, she pulled out a cookie sheet and set about fulfilling her promise to yesterday's goblin. The dough claimed itself good for two dozen cookies; she made sixteen big ones, and saved some dough away in the fridge for later snacking. The oven beeped to let her know it had finished pre-heating as she shut the refrigerator door, and she put the cookies in, barely remembering to set the timer before she flopped into one of the tall chairs at the kitchen bar.

She'd bought comfortable chairs, but they'd never seemed quite as inviting before. She sighed, relaxing a little, and let herself slump forward over her folded arms, which proved a surprisingly good cushion.

The problem with sleep is that, by its very nature, its edges are fuzzy. She couldn't begin to say when she slipped out of the waking world. And, because the subconscious is a contrary beast, she dreamed of Erin.

A buzzing intruded on the warm meld of lips, slipped sandpaper under her hand that had stroked the short dark velvet of Erin's hair, insinuated the smell of burnt cookies into mouths tasting each other and tasting of each other and of cinnamon and rum. In the dream, Sarah whimpered and growled, ignoring the buzz as her hand found Erin's right breast, cupping it, giving the hard nipple a quick pinch that made Erin catch her breath, hold it until Sarah's other hand made her _moan,_ throwing her head back, slender sinews standing out against rich dark skin. She was beautiful, breathtaking, dark chocolate and night sky stretched against the crisp white sheets and her nails dragged lines of exquisite pain down Sarah's back and she arched up into them and –

- woke, with a start, to the shriek of her fire alarm. Smoke billowed out to greet her when she opened the oven door. Coughing and cursing, she fanned it away with an oven mitt, yanked out the cookie sheet, slid it onto the stovetop and bolted for the window. She threw it open to a welcome night breeze and surely, under the alarm's noise, the sigh of leaves.

She fumbled the stepstool out of the pantry and into its upright configuration, and, her mind still cobwebby with sleep, her lips still aching for Erin's, managed after three attempts to get the alarm to shut up. From her vantage point across the folding stepstool, she surveyed the damage: cookies – burnt, but salvageable for goblin purposes; oven – going to stink for a week, and nothing she could do about it; kitchen – unharmed; weather – good enough to leave the window open; back yard – enough of a jungle that she doubted anyone would try to climb through; mental health – dubious.

She ran distracted fingers through her close-cropped hair. She hadn't talked to Erin for, what, thirteen years? Fifteen? Since well before Andrew, at any rate, and she'd loved him just as much as she'd ever loved Erin, even if it had faded, with Andrew, while she and Erin had ended it for other reasons. Lowering her hand, she sighed, shoulders drooping a bit, and climbed sedately off the stool. The last few days had dug a trawl through the layered silt of her subconscious, that was for sure, and had begun to irritate her.

Exiting the kitchen after putting away the stepstool, she paused a moment, narrowly scrutinizing the cookies, to make a bet with herself just how long it would take the goblins to show up. Sometimes, she swore, they could smell things across the worlds, provided those things entailed the possibility, however faint, of foods they enjoyed – and this encompassed most edible materials, as well as some that, to her mind, hardly qualified. Cookies, however, topped the list.

She padded out a moment later, satisfied that she would owe herself a batch of special brownies if they didn't show up before morning. Heartened by the thought and spurred on by a nagging worry about the effect of fire alarm noises upon someone whose behavior patterns, when not unconscious, included clawing himself to shreds, she took the stairs two at a time and jogged into the guest room, panting only a little, to find her charge still in place, but curled in on himself as much as splinted limbs would allow.

The squeal of a bedspring made her wince as she sat down. She apologized, inanely, and, when he flinched at the hand she put on his shoulder, left it there for a moment until he stopped shuddering quite so violently. Carefully, gently, she managed to unwind him from the bony knot of alarm she'd found him in and, after a long moment's coaxing, to pull his hand away from his face. She caught a glimpse of odd eyes, bloodshot and fever-bright, before he squeezed them shut, and held on to his hand to keep him from jerking it away. After a long five minutes or a short half-hour, she felt the thin fingers encased in stiff leather shift a little, towards hers, and allowed herself a small smile of victory.

She'd left her other hand on his shoulder. Now she moved it, slowly, up to stroke his hair. It felt stiff under her hand, and brittle with exposure to the weather; she gave up on any attempt to run her fingers through it after the fifth tangle in as many inches. She'd have to do something about that…She moved her hand slowly, repetitively, down from behind his ear to between his shoulders and, just as gradually, he relaxed and leaned into her hand, his ragged breathing evening out as he passed back into sleep, or unconsciousness, she didn't know which.

"Poor king," she whispered, almost reluctantly beginning to disentangle herself. She hadn't meant to fall asleep making the cookies; she had a lot more to do; but, as she made to let go of his hand, the motion wrung a sound out of him that sounded so small and lost she couldn't bring herself to move. Instead, she wrapped her other arm around him and leaned her cheek lightly on his shoulder, pale hair brushing her nose, and let out a slow sigh. Surely she could afford a few minutes more. Save for when she'd slept, she'd been running about like a madwoman since she found him.

He shifted a bit closer to her, exhibiting more consciousness than she thought he had in him, and she surprised herself by grinning. Progress, indeed. Last night he'd barely been breathing, and while he still sounded like hell, he hadn't stopped, and he was, apparently, aware enough to gravitate towards warmth or safety, or whatever this was about. He had a lot of explaining to do when he regained coherency, but she couldn't begin to hold this against him, not after whatever had happened.

She'd resumed petting him, like an overgrown cat. As a teenager, she hadn't been one to fiddle with her hands, but university, with its drawn-out lectures and copious notes, had gotten her in the habit, which now went hand in hand with thought. Last night, she'd had little temptation to sort through the horridly caked-together layers of his clothing, leaving her with little more than an impression of something resembling a sort of gruesome, ragged lasagna of cloth so tattered that, even before the blood, no thrift store would accept it.

It fit, she decided, quite nicely with the advent of "vive la revolution!", which left her with a time frame of a year and a half or so, either since he'd been deposed or since the goblins had gotten fed up enough with their new ruler's autocratic tendencies to come horn-blowing and flag-waving to her. Well, they hadn't come to her flag-waving. They hadn't _had_ flags until they'd made off with her panties, but that was beside the point.

So, give it two years at the max, but no less than eighteen months. That would fit with the wear on the clothes, if he had in fact spent the time Above, hopefully not in north Portland, because she hated to think how oblivious she would have to be not to have seen him, unless of course she had, and he'd been too altered to catch her attention. The thought hurt a bit. She hadn't known him well enough to call him anything save an acquaintance, but he'd been proud and powerful, and besides it pained her to see anyone so reduced.

Many of the cuts she'd tended had looked old. She wished, ruefully, that she knew medicine a bit better, so she'd have some idea how old, not that it made any difference in what she did with him. She'd still be working in the metaphorical dark, but at least it might give her an idea what she was dealing with when he came back to himself.

An uneasy possibility occurred to her, which gave her the incentive to finally disengage. Hoggle had admitted, the day she ran the maze, that Jareth terrified him, and someone had seen fit to depose him…what if he deserved it? She let out a hissing breath at the thought, hastily tucking her hands behind her back. What if she'd committed to spending time and effort nursing someone better left to die? She didn't know, that was the thing. Like it or hate it, she'd just have to wait and see, and if it went too badly, she could always brain him with her cast-iron wok.

The thought lifted her spirits. She'd always wanted an excuse to do that, and if he turned on her after all this, she wouldn't even feel bad about it.


	4. Chapter 4

(A/N: I have thirteen chapters of this saved on my computer, and I'm nearly finished with the fourteenth; I will be posting every day up through Chapter 7, then every other day until Chapter 14. After that it will probably be weekly. I can't say for sure, as I work two jobs as well as doing most of the cleaning and yardwork for a large house.

Also, I apologise for any previous formatting issues and hopefully, if previous chapters were in fact borked in that regard, this one will be better.)

The next day, she found Petco, where she purchased a pair of small, sharp shears intended for goat hooves. At Fred Meyer, she acquired more broth (both chicken and vegetable; might as well stock up,) more bandages, and plaster powder. Then, despite having lost her bet with herself, she bought a box of brownie mix. Heavens knew she could use it.

First things first, though. She took care of her patient – ridiculous thought, that, a graphic designer having a patient – and made a cursory effort to clean her house, took a shower, put on decent clothes, and arranged herself solidly in front of her closet's mirrored door. The sunlit confines of her room stretched out behind her, appearing more an expanse than aught else in reflection. She smiled at it and announced, for the first time in six weeks, "Hoggle, I need you."

"Well, why didn't yeh say so, then?"

She rolled her eyes at the old ritual. "I just did, doofus."

"Why didn't yeh say so sooner, then?" Hoggle, scowling, planted his hands on his hips. Sarah barely suppressed a grin. Pressing Hoggle's Grump Button would only make this take longer than it had to.

"I've been busy, Hoggle. Remember, I'm grown up now?" And have been for a long time, she added to herself. "I've had work and friends, and I wish I had time now, but I'm afraid I've just got a few important questions."

"Hrmf." His face screwed up in suspicion, Hoggle gave her a wary look. "Gettin' more like that lunk Jareth every time, you are."

Internally, Sarah smacked her forehead into her hands, and prayed for patience. Externally, she just pulled a wry face. "Sorry about that, Hoggle. Actually, my questions are about him."

Oh, that was bad. She'd hit the button for sure. His eyebrows threatened to disappear into his cap. "Oh, are they now?"

"I need to know who's king now, and for how long." There. Cutting to the chase ought to do it.

Sure enough, Hoggle blurted "King Magrat, since ten years ago."

"King _Magrat_?" Sarah blurted. "_Ten years_?"

"Well yes, hadn't you heard?"

"Obviously not!" she snapped, slapping her palm against the floor. "Ten years, I'll buy; I kind of thought time might go differently Underground, but why didn't you mention anything? And…_Magrat_?"

Hoggle shifted uncomfortably and mumbled, into the trowel in his hands, "She's not frightening, like Jareth," which made Sarah's insides lurch.

"Not scary? Did he hurt you?"

"He pinched me ear! He threatened t'make me a prince – of _stench_!" Belligerent all over again, the dwarf folded his arms and glared at her until, laughing, she threw her hands in the air.

"All right, all right, fair enough, Jareth's an ass. I'll give you that. But why didn't anyone mention there'd been a change?"

"We thought ye'd know, missy."

"_How, _if nobody tells me!"

The conversation turned out every bit as large as she had, wearily, predicted at that point it would be. Bringing in Didymus, if anything, made it worse. He and Hoggle would, inevitably, start talking at the same time, and then Hoggle would glare at Didymus and Didymus would get off on some courtly rant and she'd have to call them back to order. She felt like she ought to have a gavel, and that didn't even touch on their incessant arguments about the monarchy – or rather, the monarchs themselves, with Hoggle insisting that Jareth had been scary and Magrat wasn't bad, and Didymus staunchly defending the old king, despite the fact that the worst he could come up with about the new one was that she wasn't the "real" king.

Sarah sighed and rubbed her temples, staring at her finally empty mirror. She loved her friends, she really did, but they were hardly the most cooperative people in any of the worlds. Still, her main fears had been assuaged; they did not suffer under a tyrant, and she herself had not taken in the sort of person she'd like to brain with a cast-iron wok.

Which reminded her. Several hours had passed in front of the mirror, and she had a half-dead ex-king to care for.

It became routine. Sunday evening, she called in to work to claim a week of the vacation time she'd accrued in her six years at the company. She thought wistfully of the late mornings that might have occupied that time; of the travels, and the evenings of wine, and instead she got up at six anyway to check on Jareth before breakfast, and give _him_ breakfast, and make sure the goblins didn't destroy anything, and catch up on emails.

By Wednesday, she'd almost gotten used to it. He woke occasionally, and never coherently. If she was there, he would cling to her; if not, he would attempt to claw the iron out, or just stare, blankly, as if he'd already died. She'd spent Sunday evening trimming his claws as far as she dared, then filing them with heavy sandpaper until flecks of silver blood dotted the paper. The blood made her feel a bit bad, but she dared not leave them any longer. Every night since then, she'd dedicated some time to keeping the wicked things blunt.

By Friday, she'd polished off the magic brownies, and fallen to talking to her charge. She'd done it with Jocelyn, when the girl was a baby. She talked of nothing significant, but of daily occurrences, thoughts and frustrations and what the crows were up to; things that required no response, and allowed her mind to wander, but it allowed her mind to settle and order itself. As a going-to-bed ritual, it served at least as well as reading, and she hardly noticed when she picked it back up.

She called in for five more vacation days, that Friday. To her, his condition had obviously improved since she found him. Anyone who hadn't seen him then would probably have judged him at death's doorstep. She could afford a few more days, and despite the frustrating, worrisome, gruesome, and frequently disgusting process of caring for an incapacitated person, she'd actually found herself almost enjoying the break in routine.

And on Tuesday evening, shortly before she turned out the light, he woke up.

"In all honesty, Sarah dear, I believe you are overthinking it."

She had been leaning back against the pillows, his head resting in her lap, one of her hands slowly stroking his rough-cut pale hair while the other held a mug of tea, and grumbling about the much-anticipated but inevitably worrisome eventuality of picking up Jocelyn from Andrew's custody. She had expected, perhaps, to have her hand nuzzled. She had not expected _that_, and, being a paragon of grace, very nearly fell off the bed in surprise.

In some measure of surprise, she heard her own voice proclaim, more thoughtfully than it had any right to, "You're probably right, but I always worry about it. Bad habit, I suppose, but some things are just awkward and there's nothing you can do about it." She considered a moment, her hand now still against his temple. He turned and leaned into it, half-hiding; she felt the brush of lashes against her palm as he closed his eyes, and absently stroked her thumb over a sharp cheekbone. "Maybe…maybe I can convince him to let her fly here."

"Your…daughter?...can fly?"

"My daughter." She beamed despite herself, as if the syllables themselves formed the shape of joy. "Jocelyn. And no. Well, not her, personally." The startled hamster of her mind had finally sorted itself out and clambered back into the rapidly spinning wheel of reality. "She's a smart kid, though, and if he gets her on the airplane, I think she can get here without winding up in Timbuktu or something."

"Timbuktu," he repeated, voice a tattered remnant of what she remembered twenty-five years past. "Airplane…?"

She had the grace to blush. "A city in the Above, and a device for flight. Sorry about that and," her expression softened, "welcome back to the land of the living."

"Land of the living…" She felt him frown, and the warm breath of pained, silent laughter into her cupped hand. "How long…?"

"Over a week."

At that, he looked up at her, eyes briefly widening in dismay before what control was left to him snapped back into place. He nodded, wincing a little, lips tight and expression unreadable and she, forsaking the tea, took his hand.

"Don't. Please. It hasn't been a problem." She meant it, too, which surprised her a bit. She'd kept telling herself she'd find out a lot when he came to; she hadn't expected to arrive at that particular conclusion quite so quickly.

Apparently, he hadn't expected her to do so, either. For a fleeting moment he looked quite startled, and she caught a glimpse of something raw and almost pleading in his face before he hid against her hand again. She released his hand in favour of wrapping an arm around him and, as she expected, he leaned into that. If she hadn't known better (you don't, she told herself; you had a very, very strange first impression of him, a very, very long time ago,) she might almost have thought it sweet, and at any rate she felt a pang of sympathy for the ragged breathing warm against her hand.

She, remembering his pride, did not say anything, and after a moment his breath evened out, growing slow and even, aside from the odd hitch and wince. Slowly and carefully she moved her hand away from his face and ran it gently down through his hair, and then down to touch his hand.

"Are you asleep…?"

Satisfied with his silence, she rose to go, and thus barely heard the hoarse whisper that caught her at the door.

"Thank you, Sarah."

"You're welcome." She grinned radiantly over her shoulder. "Is there anything I can get you?"

"No, thank you. You've already done more…more than I'd any right to expect." He looked and sounded like hell, but she could almost swear she saw him smile, just a bit. She may or may not have hugged herself, once the door stood closed behind her, but nobody needed to know that.

"What, precisely, is this…resistance?"

Sarah, righting a fallen lamp, barely stifled a laugh. "Your successor has forbidden the luminous presence of chickens in the castle." She could have sworn she heard a muttered "finally," but when she looked back at her companion, she found him with eyes narrowed in displeasure that had nothing to do with the recent invasion of revolution-mongering hobgoblins.

"Successor?" His raised eyebrow might have come off more imposing had he not been propped against pillows barely whiter than his complexion. "Surely you mean usurper."

"Usurper." She resisted the impulse to scowl. Wednesday had brought rain, lingering into Thursday; come evening, it had lightened into a stinging drizzle in which, in true Oregonian fashion, Sarah had gone for a good long walk. Portland's fresh air brought welcome clarity to a mind beginning to feel the prodding of cabin fever. "Yes, usurper."

She risked a glance back at him. An entirely too forced smile curved thin lips under eyes that had drifted closed, probably without his awareness or permission. Usurper or no, Magrat's throne seemed quite secure to Sarah, with her only competition laid out in a mortal's guest room without a touch of magic.

Perhaps it had been a bit cruel to test that by handing him the crystal with which he'd left her over two decades back. Surely if he'd had anything at his disposal he would have done something to help himself – poked holes in the membrane of invisibility that concealed creatures of the Underground from most of the Above; lessened the effects of iron and infection; turned himself into an owl to minimize the energy necessary to stay alive - _something_. Maybe she'd thought to coax something out of the Jareth she'd met so long ago, or maybe only callous curiosity had prompted her to hand him the crystal.

"I can do nothing with this, Sarah," had been wrenched out of some painful inner place. Light refracted from the open window danced madly through the crystal he clenched so tightly she worried he would re-break bones just beginning to mend. Just as she reached to take it away, he had recovered enough to set it, with exquisite care, on the nightstand. His shaking hand had knocked it off almost immediately, and Sarah had yet to retrieve it from under the bed. In deference to his pride, she hadn't hugged him, but it had been hard. The palpable measure of self-control it took to speak each word turned them into a succession of metaphorical knives in the gut.

A quiet voice brought her back from regret. She shot him an apologetic smile, retrieving her hand from its hobby of mussing her hair. "Sorry, could you repeat that?"

"How soon do you want me gone?"

She finished getting the dresser's top drawer, and her brain, back on track before she turned to face him. He hadn't moved since she last looked. If she hadn't known better, she would have said he looked dead.

"I don't know." She smoothed her jeans down, leaving a trail of dust in the wake of her hands, and shook her head. "Whenever you're ready."

That earned another of the raw, pleading looks she'd come to dread. She would rather that than find him staring blankly at the wall again, leaving her to wonder if she'd done him any favours in keeping him breathing. The last few days had taught her not to mention it, though; dignity must be hard enough to scrape together, without an acquaintance pointing out weakness. The speed with which he regained control helped, of course. It is hard to feel too badly for a brusque nod and a businesslike "thank you," especially when one is simultaneously wrestling back into place a curtain relocated by the frenetic activity of a small army of goblins.

"You're welcome…what did I do with the screwdriver? Eat it?"

"Here."

Said screwdriver prodded her gently in the thigh. She blinked from it to the battered hand holding it, to the pale face attached to the hand, and grinned. "Thank you."

Only after she'd convinced the curtain rod to stay up, and safety-pinned the right end of the curtains in place with a promise to herself that she'd actually fix them before Christmas, did it occur to her that anything odd had happened. The gleam of lamplight through the yellow plastic of the handle caught her eye as she climbed down from the nightstand. She scrutinized it for a minute, from the end of the handle to the tip of the – blade? Shaft?

She wondered what the hell the metal part of a screwdriver was called anyway – and raised an eyebrow at Jareth. Theoretically, he'd gone back to reading the book at which the goblins had (also theoretically) interrupted him. If so, he possessed truly spectacular skills of reading with his eyes closed and his usable hand draped limply across the pages.

"This." She tossed it and caught it. It slapped lightly across her palm. "This is made of steel, which is an iron alloy."

He'd jumped at the sound, and, recovered from disorientation, gave her a sardonically inquisitive look. Come to a point, if you have one, said the look.

"You handed it to me. Let me see your hand."

God damn, she thought as one of his eyebrows ascended perilously close to his hairline, and here I thought _I'd_ gotten good at that look. He did, however, give her his hand, which she accepted gently in both of hers and turned over to inspect the palm. Despite his coherency, his hand relaxed into hers. She smiled a little, running a gentle thumb over the hollow of his wrist, and made a thoughtful sound.

"No burns or anything."

"I could have told you that."

"Oh, for…" Deep breath, Sarah. She ground her teeth together, mussed her hair again, and counted to ten. "I guess insulation works against iron. Is plastic good?"

"So it would seem. I've not been Above enough to have experimented much." He shrugged, and regretted it dearly.

"Thus the gloves?"

He nodded, guardedly. "Partly.

"So…leather works, too. Hm." She tapped her fingers together, as, alight with possibility, her mind raced. No doubt, she'd have him for a while; he'd recovered enough that she wanted to start giving him solid food, and cooking without use of iron or its commoner alloy posed a quandary. Plastic worked; but how _much _plastic? Would the organic substance of the food itself dilute it? Would Teflon coating be enough?

Beside her, something went _thump_. She let out a low hiss of breath at the interrupted train of thought, bent to retrieve the book, and gently tucked it back under his hand. She'd thought perhaps he'd fallen asleep, but his fingers closed loosely around her palm, not even pretending interest in the book. Maybe she'd let the experiments wait a few days. Dinner, and then sleep, seemed more a priority at the moment.

"Hey," she said softly, settling on the edge of the bed and leaning over to wrap an arm around him. "You want pizza?"

"That depends entirely on what it is."

So, he knew about steel, but not pizza. It made a certain sort of sense.

"Pizza is flatbread, with seasoned tomato sauce, cheese, and, if you want, meat or vegetables or both on it, frequently considered the Holy Grail of junk food." This time, close as they were, she felt him laugh.

"I think this grail of yours sounds delicious, yes. Thank you."

She laughed, nestling against him as much as she dared; she'd begun to get used to the restrained desperation with which he returned such affection. The trick was not to offend his pride. He reminded her of Erin's Siamese cat.

Apparently, he also relished the thought of pizza with pepperonis, extra cheese, and pineapple. She preferred one with everything; she had to laugh at the insistence with which he held up the piece of paper on which she'd written their orders while she was on the phone. He liked the same kind of pizza her father did.

She bid the Papa John's minion on the other end good evening, and decided the click of hanging up from a good food order was the sound of satisfaction.

"There. It should be here in half an hour – they always say forty-five minutes, but that's so you won't be too mad if it really does take that long. I'm going to get a shower before it shows up."

He opened his mouth to say something, but the phone interrupted him. Sarah, on her way out the door, threw her hands in the air and hurried back to the receiver. Why, she wondered ruefully, did phone calls always come in batches?


	5. Chapter 5

"Hello, this is-"

"Sarah!" cried the delighted male voice from the other end. "I was worried you'd be out. How's everything?"

A grin split her face. "Hey, Andrew. Things have been freaking crazy lately…How's Jocelyn?"

"Great! She's been bringing back really good grades and she's decided she wants to be an architect, or maybe a paleontologist, unless she's a…what's it called? Someone who studies bugs?"

"Um…I honestly can't remember right now, but I know what you mean. I guess she's not scared of spiders anymore?"

"Not in the least," he half-laughed, half-groaned, "she brought me a black widow in a jar the other day."

"Christ, is she –"

"She's fine. She's just not allowed TV until Sunday."

"Well that's a relief. Holy shit, she's a girl of extremes. Last time I talked to her she was on about how spiders are evil and that was, what, last week?"

"Yeah. Her little crush brought in a tarantula for show-and-tell and apparently it was 'really really awesome,' so now," she could just about hear his indulgent smile, "everything is about things with more legs than they oughta have."

"Of course. I think it's required. Toby had a phase like that. Has she made any more friends?" She shot a quelling look at Jareth, who had been on the verge of commentary or she would eat her socks, and she liked these socks, dammit.

"One or two, but not a lot. She seems happy, though. Speaking of Toby, dare I ask how what he's been up to?"

"Still with the religion thing, in a really big way. He's engaged now, to some college freshman, and elected to reach out to me this morning with a lovely little forwarded email about the virtues of modesty." That had shut Jareth up. He stared at her with an expression of almost comical skepticism; she rolled her eyes theatrically and slipped out of the room. Holding long phone conversations in someone else's company had always struck her as a bit rude.

"Seriously? Sheesh. You know, that always struck me as pretty odd, coming from your family. I figured Karen would've knocked the nonsense out of him."

"Unfortunately not," she muttered, laughing. Andrew had always found Karen a bit intimidating. "Hopefully he'll grow out of it. How's work?"

"It's…work. Nothing to complain of."

"You too, huh?"

"Yeah. Did you get that raise?"

Sarah grimaced. "Not yet, and I doubt I will. I had to take the last couple weeks off."

"Oh, shit…wait, sick leave or vacation?"

"Vacation, technically. Someone else's sick leave. Somebody I knew in high school turned up at my doorstep sick as a dog after getting evicted through no fault of his own, and he's been decent enough about it I haven't gotten around to giving him the boot."

"Poor guy. Any idea what you're gonna do with him?"

"Help him get back on his feet, but beyond that…hey, should I move him on before Jocelyn gets here? I didn't know him that well, but he's not malicious or anything and he babysat Toby for awhile when I was fifteen."

"He's not where Toby got his cultist bent, now, is he?"

It was her turn to groan. "Oh, god no, I don't even know if Jareth's religious."

"Fair enough," Andrew conceded reluctantly. "Just…keep an eye on him, okay?"

"Of course, Andrew. Jo's my kid too, remember?"

"Yeah, I…yeah. Sorry. Hey, my partner for our current project is supposed to be calling in about twenty minutes, and I was wondering if you wanted to get travel arrangements taken care of, just because – "

"Because it'll drive us both nuts if we don't? Yeah. Sounds good. Hey, because of everything that's been happening recently, I was wondering if maybe you could fly her up here? I can meet you halfway, if you really don't want to, but with missing so much work lately…" She trailed off, feeling vaguely guilty for the question. Did this make her a bad mother?

To her relief, Andrew blurted a laugh. "Not at all. Honestly, I've been thinking about it too – things haven't been as crazy here but we're in the middle of one big project and then immediately getting started on another and if I travel in the middle of it it's gonna take forever to catch up."

A measure of tension she'd only been half aware of gusted out of her on a sudden sigh. "Okay. Good. Awesome. Float the idea to her in the next couple days and tell me what she thinks of it, all right?"

"Yeah, absolutely."

"Listen, is she home right now?"

"No. She came down with a spontaneous case of sleeping over at Meghan's house and, well, you know how Jo is about other kids, so I let her go. Can I have her call you in the next couple days?"

"Absolutely!" Flopping over the back of the couch, she laughed delightedly. "That would be absolutely amazing. Andrew, you are fantastic."

"Oh I know I am. I learned from the best, after all."

"Poppycock. Didn't anyone ever teach you not to flirt with your ex-wife?"

"Kinda hard, when she does it right back."

"Semantics, semantics. Take care, okay?"

"You too. Tell this friend of yours that if he breaks your heart or your stuff, I'll kick his ass, okay?"

"You presume there would be any left to kick. Talk to you later."

She hung up with a delighted cackle, grinned up at the ceiling, and informed it, gleefully, "My daughter's coming home in two weeks. Life is awesome." Or at least she would have, if the doorbell hadn't rung halfway through 'awesome.' A flailing scramble over the back of the couch landed her on her feet at a dead run for the front door; she slammed on the proverbial brakes and slid the last few yards to, flushed and beaming, throw the door open to the delivery guy.

"Dinner!"

He boggled at her.

"Sorry about that. Those smell delicious." She signed for the food and, after picking up plates and napkins from the kitchen, headed upstairs, humming off-key. Things might be crazy, but they were looking up. Missing Jocelyn, though hardly all-consuming, lurked at the core of her like a low-grade headache, ever-present just below the threshold of awareness. Change made it noticeable; more nights than she liked to admit, before the chaos of the last week and a half, had found her leaning on the doorframe of her daughter's room, peering wistfully at books and toys that hadn't been touched for months.

Maybe she should have been used to the routine of custody, but the concrete knowledge of seeing her daughter in two weeks had her all but skipping. She even had someone to tell! She bounded up the last of the stairs and down the hall and threw the guest room door open with a bounce.

"Jareth! I come bearing good tidings and deliciousness. What do you think of children?"

"Better than goblins," he announced promptly, barely suppressing a smirk, "because they're more intelligent and they don't drink; worse, because defenestrating them is generally frowned upon. So, the cute little baby I so magnanimously abducted at your request has become a wingnut?"

"God, yes, I wish you'd kept him. That cute little baby grew up to be a right pain the butt."

"I thought that was common practice."

To her everlasting pride, she neither laughed nor threw her pizza at him. Instead, she met his gaze levelly, raised an eyebrow to match his, and announced, "Consider this an IOU beating for when you're not half-dead."

"Why wait?"

"Because," she informed him, studiously avoiding eye contact in favour of scrutinizing her pizza, "that would hardly be fair."

"No, but it would be a piece of cake."

"What kind?" Laughter lurked around the edges of her voice. She made the mistake of eye contact; he glanced away hurriedly, biting his lip, but the damage was done. Sarah set her pizza down to keep from getting grease everywhere and gave herself up to snickering.

"Ch-chocolate," gasped the crumple of not-exactly-human on her bed, "and consider your IOU redeemed."

"I'll think about it. You all right?"

"Eternally." A grin more like a rictus than a smile showed a flash of teeth in a waxen face. Physically, he looked deader than he had in almost a week; Sarah couldn't bring herself to feel too bad, though, with him so patently present and alive in mind and spirit. Maybe, she told herself, the hollowness was part and parcel of the bodily harm; maybe that would heal as the rest of him did.

She stole a glance at him as she bit into her pizza. Marvelous, how hunger will just sneak up on you; she hadn't felt particularly hungry when she ordered it, but she found herself ravenous and, given that he'd been living off soup, expected her companion to be the same.

Even so, surprise entirely failed at the sight of him decorously nibbling, as if pizza were some gourmet delicacy and her guest room a banquet hall crowded with all the nobles of the Underground. Of course. Ever the king. The words escaped before she really registered their presence.

"You must miss it."

He didn't deign to startle, but rather aimed a skeptically inquiring look her way.

"Kingship." She gestured encompassingly. "The Underground."

"Ah." Had he flinched, or did she imagine that? Either way, his voice came out carefully neutral. "Yes. It is what I am."

"Should I be getting word to your friends down there?"

"Magrat does not appear to be abusing my subjects, or my Labyrinth," he answered curtly, scrutinizing the crust held in his hand. For a non-answer, it said quite a bit.

"Is there anyone else like you, among your subjects?"

"No. We are a collection of oddities. There is no one else like me."

Then why do you want to go back? She didn't ask; like thin ice, he might snap, and the edges would cut her.

"What did you do there, aside from dealing with kids people wished away? Did you hunt, or hold feasts, or – "

"I am king," he answered, thin ice creaking under the strain of something as much grief as anger. "I rule. I serve. I am king."

Sarah, wisely, shut up and ate her pizza.


	6. Chapter 6

Work came as a strange sort of relief, after two weeks at home with no company save Jareth and the occasional nosy or amiable neighbour. Sarah may or may not have patted her car's dashboard and murmured "good girl" as the trusty little engine roared to life. That was beside the point. She was a grown woman and could talk to inanimate objects to her heart's content, if she so pleased.

"Sarah!" the receptionist cried, waving, as the door swung shut behind you. "How was your break? Did you drink a lot of margaritas? Climb Mount Hood?"

"No, no, no, unfortunately." Laughter bubbled up irresistibly. "No, I stayed at home and drank boxed wine and played nursemaid. An old acquaintance dropped in from out of town."

"Oooh. An old flame?"

"Maybe. I hadn't seen him since high school and he's fallen on some really hard times, which is why the nursing. God, sick people are a pain in the ass."

Amelia snickered into her sleeve. "Whiny?"

"No," groaned Sarah, "stubborner than a whole posse of elderly billy-goats. You haven't been letting the boss push you around too much, have you?"

"Oh, yes," she continued in the same projecting tone Sarah had adopted, "he's been absolutely tyrannical. The coffee must be _just so_, and not half a second late, and would you know he's set up a gladiatorial arena around the copier?"

"Good thing you're a dab hand with a mechanical pencil, then," interjected aforementioned boss, from his time-honoured position of lurking in the doorway. Sarah grinned like an idiot. It was good to be back.

Having kept up with emails from colleagues and clients significantly cut down on the backlog of bureaucracy waiting to greet her, which only compounded the relief with which she settled in for a good solid Monday poring over her tablet, researching, bothering co-workers and, of course, consuming frightening amounts of caffeinated beverages. Vacation always turned recent returnees into novelties for a few days; she found herself swarmed with inquisitive colleagues, wanting to know how everything had gone, what was her guest like, wasn't "staycation" the silliest term ever coined…Never, she reflected, did procrastination prove so easy as when one had no real incentive to indulge in it.

Come lunchtime, Amelia and Travis absconded with her to check out a sushi restaurant Travis had discovered in her absence. She leaned back in the booth, content to enjoy the goblin-free ambiance as he extolled the place's culinary virtues. It did go down well – yet another nice change from two weeks of takeout and sandwiches. Funny, she thought, how spending awhile sitting around at home living off BLT's and wearing jeans that hail back to your college days sounds absolutely terrific until you actually have to do it.

"So, Sarah, when do you get to pick your daughter up, again?"

"I…oh!" She flashed a sheepish grin at having to be startled out of her musings. "A couple more weeks. Hopefully things will be settled with Jareth by then."

"Are you going to go pick her up over the weekend? It's a bit of a drive, right?"

"Actually, she's flying in. Andrew and I both have a lot going on and, according to Jo, it's going to be awesome and she's going to wear her Batman shirt. I guess there's some connection between Batman and airplanes."

"Apparently!" laughed Travis. "One of these days, I might have to have kids just so I can find out why you glow like that when we get you talking about her."

"Want me to let you in on a secret?" She lifted an eyebrow at him, a smile lurking about the corners of her eyes. "Lean in."

He did so, a bit trepidatiously, and she stage whispered "It's because I survived her infancy."

"Not a fan of babies?" snickered Amelia from the other side of the booth.

"Not really. They're cute, I guess, but they're really demanding and not the best conversation, y'know? My brother drove me _nuts_ when he was that age."

"Fair enough. She know about this friend of yours?"

Tossing back a sip of tea, she smiled into her mug at the mention of Jareth and fairness in the same sentence. "Yeah. She's a bit cautious about the idea of him, but she'll get over it. She's a good kid and he claims he's good with children, though I haven't seen him with any since he babysat the brother."

"Speaking of whom, any plans to visit back east?"

"Honestly, I don't know." She frowned, rotating her mug between steepled fingertips. That very question had been quietly waiting its turn to nag her. "I was planning on it – I've got Jo til May, you know? – but I hadn't figured on taking off a couple weeks here."

"You've still got a lot." Amelia offered her an encouraging smile. "I mean, you haven't taken much before."

"It's true. It's just that I wasn't planning on _this_ , and it kind of makes me want to be careful, in case something else comes up." Three weeks ago, she thought, she wouldn't have said that. What remained in her of the frustrated fifteen-year-old cursed Jareth for that change.

She returned to a house full of sunlight and music, and found herself humming as she slung her briefcase off onto the coat hook by the door, and shucked her shoes onto the shelf beside it. They landed with the satisfying clatter that punctuates a long day out of the house, and she grinned, flexing brightly-socked toes against the tile while reflecting upon the oddity of music. She most certainly hadn't _left_ a house brimming with Marc Bolan's voice.

Quiet on stockinged feet, she padded from the foyer to the living room and paused, with her hands on her hips, to survey the damage. There wasn't any, really. He'd even put her CD's back in order; she had to smile a little, even as she shook her head, remembering showing him last week how, exactly, one makes shiny discs produce music. At the time, she'd just put on some classical – even Underground monarchs, apparently, know Mozart.

From the stereo across the room, she looked down, over the back of the couch directly in front of her, and pulled a wry face at the thin figure mostly hidden under a blanket Karen had crocheted her years ago. Each segment was made to resemble a slice of toast; every other one bore a sunny yellow simulacrum, in soft alpaca yarn, of a pat of butter, and it went altogether very well with Jareth's shock of pale hair. She successfully diverted the urge to ruffle it into a more productive rearrangement of the blanket to cover his left hand, which had escaped from underneath to curl forlornly around nothing.

It tried, of course, to curl around hers. Merciless in her quest for an afternoon shower and a bite to eat, she gave it a blanket instead, and he subsided with a soft mournful sound that almost undid her resolution not to muss his hair. This was Jareth, not Jocelyn. That could wait. On the way past, she straightened the cane she'd picked up for him at Goodwill a few days before – she considered hiding it, briefly, but he'd probably insist on getting up and about anyway.

By the time he awoke, she'd settled, damp and serene, into a recliner by the fireplace, and commenced losing herself in a book. Though she'd improved about staying in touch with the rest of the world while reading, she still might not have noticed, had he not woken with a start and a stifled cry. Startled in turn, she clapped the book shut and stared at him a moment while her heart slowed back to a normal rate and he slowly lowered the battered hand he'd hidden behind.

He stared at her, raw and uncomprehending, pleading; she, transfixed, stared back, until, with a ragged sigh, he went limp against the couch and remembered to breathe. Then and only then she moved, rose hastily, and crossed the room to sit beside him, taking his hand in hers. Through the leather it shook, hard, in waves. She slipped the glove off and enveloped it in both of hers until the shaking stop and his breath evened out, save for the occasional hitch of pain, loud in silence whose advent she could not remember. When had the music stopped?

"Is the upstairs stereo on the fritz again?" she asked, to interrupt the cloying quiet.

He nodded; she pressed her lips together in irritation but said nothing. Probably she should have told him not to go downstairs. It fell, logically, under "you shouldn't be up, except to use the restroom or clean up," but she'd begun to realise that he shared certain distressing similarities to her, including a stubborn streak comprising most of his personality. She doubted he would have listened, even if she'd said something.

The tired silence had seeped back in. Since it had already claimed him, she took it on herself to break it, albeit quietly, in case he'd gone back to sleep. It was hard to tell, with his dark thick lashes so still against his pale cheeks. Now that his breath came easier, he looked not just sleeping but dead.

"I'm surprised you chose that, for music."

He smiled without opening his eyes.

"I like your music."

"And how would you know?"

That weary smile unfurled into a shade of the wicked grin her adolescent self remembered as he pronounced, with relish, "Shameless eavesdropping. Interesting place, your Above."

Annoyance stirred sluggishly at his insistent alienness.

"Not _mine_. If it interests you so much, why didn't you spend more time here?"

At last, he opened his eyes, absent this time the desperation that had struck her before.

"I am king, Sarah. Who would I leave as regent?"

"I don't know. Who did you leave in charge when you came to get me and Toby? Or while you were oh so generously badgering me in the maze? You got back and forth quickly enough." She hoped he realised her irritation had faded to curiosity; to judge by his thoughtful pause, he did.

"Touché." He sighed, allowing a flicker of a bitter smile. "I don't know about monarchs Above, but Below we swear a…not an oath, but deeper and more real." His lips pursed in irritation. "A…a geas. A binding. We are bound to our kingdoms, and cannot leave for long, nor leave our love too much elsewhere, or that bond will waste away."

Without realizing, she'd leaned forward, one elbow on her knee, the other hand absently toying with the edge of the blanket. The talk of binding roused some empathic claustrophobia; she found herself a bit rapt.

"Leaving you free?"

"No. Leaving us hollow, and the magic which comprises the core of our kingdoms thrown off-kilter, wreaking havoc, until another suited to the position takes the geas." Some subtle thing shifted in the sharp planes of his face. His eyes, and the shadows under them, showed very dark against his pale skin. "A king who forsakes his kingdom dies."

"So you couldn't spend much time Above?" she asked softly, holding on to her hands to keep them from reaching for his. His pride would turn prickly at that.

"It would have all but destroyed the Labyrinth. Perhaps it would have altogether. It is a very strange kingdom."

"In_deed_," she managed, before snickering helplessly. After a moment, he allowed himself a bit of a grin, and Sarah relaxed a little. Perhaps she'd read too much between the lines just now. After all, his responsibility to the kingdom was crucial; concern for his own wellbeing went unsaid, right? "If nothing else, you've been around enough to pick up damn good taste in music."

"My tastes are _always_ superior," he informed her, archly. At fifteen, she would have taken offense at his arrogance. At forty, she caught the flicker of mischief about the corners of his mouth, and felt an immense surge of fondness for him. Things had better work out all right, or there would be hell to pay.


	7. Chapter 7

Sarah had been one of those kids who wake early on Christmas morning, too excited to go back to sleep; even after her father married Karen, and they started having Hanukkah, Christmas had still been a big deal, even if she felt a bit silly for it at fourteen. By fifteen, she could blame Toby. She was doing it for him, of course.

At thirty-nine, Christmas didn't hold a candle to the day Jo came home. Dawn had just begun to climb greyly through the window when she started into consciousness and beamed at the ceiling, her stomach turning backflips against her spine. One thing she'd never learned was to quell excitement to go back to sleep; another, was to stop trying to do so.

After an hour or so, she gave up, swung her bare feet onto the cool floor, and trotted down the hall to shower. She'd thought herself awake; the hot water cleared her head and calmed the nervous anticipation a bit. Jo got in at ten. The clock on the wall read ten to seven. She had time, she had time.

She spiked her hair up; she put on a touch of makeup, and frowned at herself in the mirror, frustrated with the internalized, mistaken notion that she somehow had to compete with Andrew for her daughter's affection, to be some beautiful mother-goddess from a fairy tale. She wondered how people felt whose divorces had been tangled and nasty, whose kids _didn't_ squeak with excitement when they called.

The unaccountable silt of depression settled in a fine film over excitement. Dressed, she slipped out of the steamy restroom into the welcome coolness of the hall, not to her room but to the guest room. Her knock produced no response; she'd grown too used to that to worry. Half the time, he didn't respond, and sure enough, when she opened the door, Jareth sat with his head bowed over a book, held open with an un-gloved hand. The blinds were still closed, and the covers, though pulled up, un-rumpled.

She deliberately scuffed a foot against the floor. He didn't flinch; awake, he never flinched, but belatedly he looked at her and offered a faint, bitter quirk of the lips and a curt, regal nod. He had to know she realised he hadn't slept. She wondered if he realised, too, how long it had taken him to react.

"Are you hungry?"

"I suppose it's that time, isn't it. Thank you. I shall be downstairs in a moment."

Sarah bit back irritation: at the eternal dance of non-answers; at his bleak, sardonic distance; at his bloody-minded insistence upon coming downstairs when, she was fairly certain, a doctor would have outright ordered him not to walk. Already irritated with her own anxiety, and not wanting to further ruin the morning with argument, she turned on her heels and strode downstairs with a vengeance, where she proceeded to crankily make coffee.

At least, she intended to crankily make coffee. When she opened the curtains, though, sunlight tumbled in through the rain and she blurted a surprised laugh. Five minutes later found the kitchen full of the good-natured grumble of perking coffee and the susurrus of rainfall. Sarah leaned out the window with her elbows on the sill, hands turned upward and face tilted toward the sky, wiggling her fingers a little as if to tickle the rain.

She heard the careful, uneven footsteps behind her, of course, but only noticed enough not to start when he placed a gentle hand on her shoulder and asked, quietly, "Is it better, now?"

"Not exactly." She covered his hands with hers; his fingers felt very thin, and very cold, but they squeezed her shoulder gently and she leaned back into him, just a little. "That isn't how it works, really; but I'm not about to murder anyone, right now."

"Well, that's a relief."

Turning back to catch his eye, she stifled a laugh, and caught him doing the same. Her attempt at severity fell off altogether in the face of his; she pulled him into a tight hug, laughing harder than the situation merited and, after a moment, felt him cautiously return the gesture. The hand that had touched her shoulder made its shaky way down the curve of her skull with a slowness that spoke of thought. She looked up at him and found him regarding her with frank curiosity and a decidedly birdlike tilt to his head, which only fueled her amusement.

"You…you looked like you did in the maze. When I was younger. When you were trying to be impressive."

"Do you mean to imply I wasn't?" He lifted one eyebrow sharply and quite imperiously. This time, she saw the humour her teenage self had missed, lurking about the corners of his mouth and eyes, and allowed herself to beam at him.

"_Exceedingly_. You were absolutely terrifying."

"Awe-inspiring, as well?"

"The very definition."

"And ravishingly attractive, of course."

Sarah choked off a laugh.

"Now you're pushing it."

"Ah, well." He sighed, winced, and offered a dry smile. "It was worth a try."

"Says you. Scoot. I still need to get breakfast."

To her mild surprise, he obeyed; he stepped wrong, though, and she found herself quiet suddenly with a limp armful of person. Reflexively she'd caught him as she would have anyone else in the same situation, and discovered she'd lifted him off the ground altogether. A moment's irrational terror possessed her – the light, chilled figure collapsed against her couldn't possibly be living. Then he stirred and mumbled, and she let out a breath she didn't realise she'd held.

"What was that?"

"Eggs."

"Eggs?" She eased back a little, keeping an arm around him nonetheless, as she didn't trust him to stay upright on his own.

"Oblong, usually white. Bird gametes. Eggs. I am going to cook some for you."

She blinked at him while her brain caught up, but before it did, blurted, accusingly, "You know how to cook?"

"I know how to observe." He tapped her smartly on the nose. "And I am not sure 'knows how to cook' is a descriptor that could honestly apply to _anyone_ in this household."

"Oh, you - "

"On the other hand, _someone_ has an aeroplane to meet in an hour and a half."

Sarah opened her mouth, closed it. Opened it. Closed it again, decided to let Jareth live, and poured herself a coffee.


	8. Chapter 8

She stood at the edge of the gate, on her tiptoes, craning and peering into the crowd. Airports hadn't particularly intimidated her for years, and Portland's was, as airports went, a decent one, with its open thoroughfares and reasonable size. With her daughter somewhere in the flood of arrivals, though, it seemed overwhelming.

For the fifth time or so, she dropped back to her heels and took a swig of her coffee. There was no point in driving herself crazy. None at all.

"Mom?" piped a little voice, then, excitedly, "Mom!" and Sarah set down her coffee just soon enough to catch the small enthusiastic blur of turquoise that launched itself at her. She didn't bother to brace herself. Instead she span them both around while Jocelyn crowed with laughter, snuggling into her and wrapping her legs around Sarah's waist to hug her with every inch of her being. Sarah grinned so hard her face hurt, nuzzling into her daughter's silky dark hair.

"Mom, I flew. I _flew_!" Jocelyn gasped, leaning back to beam gap-toothedly at her mother, a perfect picture of unrestrained seven-year-old glee in the found of which Sarah found herself laughing in vicarious excitement.

"You did, baby! Did it go okay?"

"Mhm! They gave me soda and peanuts with _honey_ on them and it was really good but the movie they played was really boring, and I'm hungry."

"Well then, come on, let's get your stuff, and we can get lunch on the way home, okay?"

"Okay. Can we go to Sheri's?"

Sarah suppressed a grin. This time last year Jocelyn had been terrified of spiders, and her favourite colour had been purple, but some things never changed. Then again, she couldn't blame her daughter. Sheri's were great believers in cheese, and sometimes, cheese is all that matters.

She let Jocelyn carry her up in the tide of excitement – or, at least, that was what she told herself. She wasn't sure she believed her. She wasn't sure one should believe a forty-year-old skipping in public. By the time they pulled up in Sheri's parking lot, they had covered a vast conversational territory ranging from spiders (enthusiasm rating: high) to school (enthusiasm rating: would rather talk about shoelaces) to goblins.

"Can I still play with the goblins? Dad says they aren't real but that's stupid."

"Yeah, of course you can. I think they'd be really sad if you didn't; most people can't see them, though." She paused, mood turning a bit pensive. "Jo?"

"Mmmmhm?" came the distracted response. Sarah glanced down at her daughter, who stood, hands clasped obediently behind her back, staring raptly into the glass-fronted cooler full of pies. The pensiveness evaporated as abruptly as it came.

"You remember the friend I mentioned? The one I took in because he got hurt and didn't have anyplace to stay?"

"Yeah. Does he like pie?"

"Yes, he does! He's from the same place the goblins are, so most people can't see either. Do you recall what it was like when you first moved to San Diego, and you didn't know anyone?"

"Mhm." Jo, obviously preferring to think about pies, frowned up at her. "I didn't _like_ it. I didn't have anyone to talk to."

Sarah winced a little, inside.

"So pie would've been even better than usual, yeah?"

"Pie was the _best_."

"I thought so! What kind of pie do you think we should get, to cheer him up?"

Jo took her sweet time considering this important matter. Sarah directed an apologetic smile at a hovering hostess before allowing her attention to drift back to the serious little face in front of the cooler, lit with its chilly light. She looked at her daughter and saw Andrew, in the cast of her eyes, in the way she held her hands behind her back to keep out of trouble. She wondered if Andrew, looking at Jocelyn, saw Sarah.

"_Blackberry_," said Jo, decisively, interrupting her mother's reflection. "Because it tastes like summer."

She smiled and hugged her, then chatted with the hostess as the latter seated them, to hide her own discomfiture. Because it tastes like summer; what a very Jareth thing to say. That almost-forgotten little red book she'd had said the Goblin King fell in love with the girl. She hadn't thought of that in a long, long time; she remembered, too, her fear, the first few days after she'd found him, of whether or not she'd done the right thing – occasioned not by how dead he looked when he thought himself unobserved, but by the unsettling memory of Hoggle's fearful dislike of the erstwhile king.

The thought didn't preoccupy her, per se, but it did keep cropping up throughout lunch, and on the way home. She grudgingly bought something to take back to him, and laughed at Jo's eager "If he doesn't eat it all, can I have it?"

By the time they arrived home, though, it had become a nagging worry. Something in her hardened when she opened the front door to catch a glimpse, over the back of the couch, of pale hair. The house still smelled a bit like burned eggs, from Jareth's experiments in cuisine; despite his ruined hand, he'd managed to get a window open, and the rainy breeze had begun to erase it. A small movement told her Jo had ducked behind her to peer around at Jareth, as she so often did with new people. Sarah found herself at a loss for words. Had he fallen asleep downstairs again?

If he had, the door closing woke him. Hopefully Jo didn't catch his flinch; that would be difficult to explain, and Sarah found herself disinclined to cut him any slack, despite the questioning half-smile he shot her. The smile he gave Jo, on the other hand, was welcome and, to Sarah at least, unexpectedly gentle.

"Hello. Would you be the notorious Jocelyn?"

The little body behind her shifted forward a little.

"What's notorious mean?"

"It means infamous – much talked about, for all the things you get into."

"Mom talks about me?"

Jareth's face, schooled into a solemn expression, very nearly betrayed a smile.

"Constantly."

"Does she say nice things?" By now, she'd sidled forward around Sarah to peer at him, frankly, hands once more folded behind her back and face concentrated into a moue of stubborn curiosity. Jareth finally let himself smile.

"What do you think?"

Sarah stifled a laugh, albeit a tense one, as Jo glared up at her. "_Do _ you talk about me? Do you say nice things?"

"Of course I do, sweetheart!"

"She's pulling your leg, you know. _She_ told me that you absolutely _hate_ turquoise and spiders."

"Do not!"

"And that you think a turquoise spider would be the worst thing ever." He caught Jocelyn's eye, suppressing a smile, and Sarah almost heard it click. For the first time in months, the house rang with her daughter's laughter.

"She's _silly_. She told me _you_ hate pie!"

"Now then, that's just outrageous. Will you help me keep an eye on her?"

"Mhm!" Jo trotted a few steps forward, then glanced back at Sarah for permission, and Sarah, at last, allowed herself to relax. Smiling, she gave Jo the go-ahead.

"I _am_ here, you know," she reminded them, letting herself into the kitchen to set the boxed food down while their conversation carried on behind her. From over her shoulder, she heard, from Jareth, a decisive "poppycock!" and, from Jo, "Are not!"

She snickered and wandered back out to lean on the doorframe, arms folded, assessing them. Jo sat perched on the arm of the chair, arms wrapped almost protectively around Jareth's thin shoulders; he had one arm around her and looked, to Sarah's eyes, somewhat at ease.

"If I'm not here, then who's going to give you two pie, huh?"

Two very different faces turned to her, with identical expressions of hope.

"Delicious pie." She allowed herself a slow, smug smile, and hoped Jareth didn't look too closely at anything beyond that. "Blackberry. It tastes like summer."


	9. Chapter 9

They were building a castle on Jocelyn's bedroom wall.

Sarah couldn't remember, by then, whose idea it had been, save "not hers." Granted, it had probably been her _fault_, for leaving her laptop open to an interior design blog she poked through in her occasional fits of deluded desire to give the house some kind of coherent décor, but by the time she got out of the shower it had transformed into something else entirely, with the final result that half of Jo's north-facing wall, opposite the big window, had turned green with whatever one calls the thin foundation pieces for Lego structures.

She hadn't been keen on the idea, of course. Bolting Lego components to walls goes ahead every maternal pretext in the book, and quite a few nobody had thought to write down, and for that she blamed Jareth. However, she had to admit she liked the result.

"It ought to have a _moat_," announced Jocelyn, arms folded, critically regarding their handiwork. Most of it was hers, of course, but even Sarah had, far less grudgingly than she let on, pitched in.

"How do you propose we get a moat on the wall?"

"Magic?" Sarah raised an eyebrow, but let it drop as Jareth flinched at her suggestion. Seated on the edge of the bed, peering over Jocelyn, he looked undeniably wan in comparison with the rosy-cheeked child. He rallied from her faux pas, though, and lifted a sardonic bow back at her.

"Well, we _could_ build a maze. Jocelyn, what is your opinion on mazes?"

She turned to peer at him solemnly, all shrewd seven-year-old consideration, and at last announced, "I like mazes. I like mazes a _lot_."

"Sarah, pass us a corner?" Jareth smiled at her disarmingly; she mimed exasperation, and passed him a blue lego corner.

"It's not going to be a maze that changes shape, is it?"

"That depends entirely on Jo." He smiled serenely, refusing to take the bait. "She's the mastermind here."

"I'm an _evil_ mastermind. It's a moving maze. See?" She rearranged the block and beamed expectantly back at them.

"Excellent! That ought to keep invaders flummoxed for a while."

"What does flummoxed mean?"

"Confused. Bewildered." He glanced back at Sarah, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. "Very much not thinking getting into your castle is a piece of cake."

"Unless, of course, it is."

"Nuh-uh." Jocelyn shook he head determinedly. "It's gonna be a _hard_ maze and I ought to have something else at the end, _eep_!"

They all jumped as the phone shrilled; there ensued a general scramble of limbs, which Jocelyn won by virtue of being tiny and agile.

"Hello?" she chirped, then looked at Sarah and added, dutifully, "this is Jocelyn." Sarah offered her an approving smile and got the feeling that Jareth, behind her, did the same. It came with a flash of annoyance; her parenting was _her_ business, and Andrew's, no one else's.

As if on cue, Jocelyn squeaked in delight.

"It's _Daddy_! Mom, can I talk to him?"

"Of course, sweetie. You want us to go somewhere else?"

"Nuh-uh. I'm going downstairs."

Sarah, annoyance forgotten, smiled after her departing daughter, then looked back at Jareth to find him watching her in amused curiosity.

"I always phone downstairs. She likes to do what I do. So, do you think she should have an impossible staircase at the end of her maze?"

"Is she going to grow into your sharp tongue, too?" He didn't do a very good job stifling an amused smirk. "My staircase," if she hadn't grown used to him, she wouldn't have caught his wince, "is perfectly feasible."

"Yeah, yeah, if you take M.C Escher as architectural advice."

"It's quite easy."

"_Practical_ architectural advice, Jareth!" She'd given up on not laughing. He, clinging to solemnity by the barest and most obvious of threads, gave her an arch look.

"You must admit, it worked well enough for me."

"Up to a certain point."

He very nearly cracked a smile. "And who's to say I didn't mean for that to happen?"

"What are you, a cat?" She, expecting to release his pent-up laughter, punched his uninjured arm lightly; she barely caught the flash of terrified fury in odd eyes before his hand clenched around her wrist. For once, his pupils matched, dilated in alarm – or anger, to match his waxen face.

"Never. Hit me again." The words broke her shock. She wrenched her arm away so sharply it wrenched a stifled hiss of pain from him, which she didn't regret in the least. Her own voice sounded foreign in her ears, icy and shaking with rage.

"Sorry. I forgot about the huge _fucking_ stick up your ass. Get out of my daughter's room. Go. Now."

He didn't need to be told twice. Sarah couldn't even begin to make herself feel badly, either, for all he had to stop to lean on the door, breath short with pain but every inch of him as rigid in anger as she felt.

Jocelyn trotted back in some ten minutes later to find her angrily, methodically building up the walls of the colourful little maze. Sarah didn't even realise she was there, at first, til the small voice piped up "Where's Jareth?"

It made her jump a little. She started, then forced a smile. Lying to one's kids had always struck her as just as bad as lying to anyone else; some things, however, she did not want to get into with a seven-year-old.

"In his room. Tired."

"He's _always_ tired." Jo flopped down fretfully on the edge of the bed and eyed her with solemn worry. "Mom, is he going to die?"

I wish, she thought; then, No I don't. I'm not like that.

"He's a lot better than when he came here, Jo. I know it doesn't seem like it, but he is. Do you want to help me with the maze?"

"…okay," sighed Jo, dubiously, kicking her feet. Reluctantly, she hopped off the bed and resumed aiding and abetting Sarah's architectural endeavours. By the time her bedtime rolled around, Sarah's anger had cooled. The chill left in its wake, however, felt bleak in comparison to their previous warmth. Once Jo had gone to bed, she went downstairs to find Jareth.

He sat on the couch downstairs, a pale blur in the half-light, save for where the lamp on the coffee table turned his pale, ragged hair to a bedraggled halo. Sarah paused at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the railing, to watch him. He had made tea; two mugs rested on the coffee table, steaming gently. That would have taken two trips, between the condition of his hands, and the presence of the cane leaned against the couch. No longer did he look angry or, really, anything except weary, with grey-pale skin and shadowed canyons under his eyes.

He's always tired, Jo had said, and asked if he was going to die. Sarah shook her head slowly. He _was_ doing better, wasn't he? He'd said an Underground monarch without their realm dies of the emptiness where it had been, but…but when she'd found him, he'd been delirious and barely breathing. This had to be an improvement, even if he didn't so much as move when she cleared her throat.

She considered saying something, then considered it again, shook her head, and descended the last few steps. A floorboard creaked at her approach. He didn't react to that either. She wondered if he'd gone to sleep with his eyes open, staring expressionlessly into the middle distance. If so, he did it often.

"Jareth?"

He started violently at her light touch on his shoulder, and choked off a small sound of pain before offering her a look equal parts wary and weary. For a moment she gazed down at him, ordering thoughts that had scattered at the muffled cry, then asked, abruptly, "May I sit?"

"Yes. I made tea."

"Thank you."

"Peppermint."

"Thank you," she repeated, and paused, then smiled a bit. "My favourite."

"I know." Another moment's tense silence fell. The small tintinnabulation of porcelain on wood, as Jareth's shaky hand restlessly turned his mug, only enhanced it. It crawled into Sarah's nerves and did a tap-dance on them, as the words built up bitterly, scraping behind her teeth until the need to say them overwhelmed the desire not to.

"I'm sorry," she said, staccato and grudging, forcing her hands not to knot. "Sorry I hit you. Sorry I snapped at you."

For enough she began to think he would not respond, he held his silence. When he spoke, she heard in his voice an echo of her own.

"I'm sorry, as well. I should not have…" He caught himself, suddenly, as if at sharp pain, or the realization he had been about to say something unforgivable. "I should not have reacted as I did." The smile he gave her held absolutely nothing save the effort it took to produce except, perhaps, a bleak weariness, or a touch of self-deprecation. "Forgive me?"

"Of course." To her surprise, Sarah felt her forced smile turn genuine, if sad. She touched his good hand lightly; it flinched, and she twitched back. "You really did do it all for me, didn't you?"

"Yes." At the sound of his soft, raw voice, she looked up from her tea, just in time to catch some lost, pleading thing in his expression, before he hid it behind his usual composure. "It…is an obligation of mine; the Labyrinth is a border kingdom, neither fully enough integrated with the Underground to subsist without the Above, nor mundane enough to exist _in_ the above. We are a place of wild magic, which needs to be given shape. It is more than any one person can do alone."

"So you sort of…enlist people from Above? That's a bit creepy."

He gave a brief sharp flash of a smile.

"If you so view it. Some choose to prey - on fears and hatreds, which often intersect, or on more concrete things."

"And you?"

"You might say the Labyrinth has a symbiotic relationship with dreams, both those you have in your sleep and those your waking mind entertains. There are very…very few who even know of our existence." His mug danced a staccato jig upon the table. He stared at it, hard, his face a study in stoic pain. "Those that do…I try to keep, perhaps not physically, but to keep them aware. Open. To keep them from destroying themselves, or becoming entirely mundane."

"So is that why you fell in love with a fifteen-year-old girl?" Sarah clapped a hand over her mouth as the last word tumbled out. She had not meant the bitterness, not now, not so undeserved; she thought he could tell, though, or the look he gave her would have held more indignation than dry amusement.

"I was hardly in love with you, in the manner which you mean, until you broke out of the dream I sent you. I was in love, precious thing, with your imagination and your potential." She might have thought him angry, then, but for the ghost of a smile tugging at the corners of his eyes and mouth. "I suggest you find your villain elsewhere."

"Fair enough." She caught herself smiling again, then felt it fade. "So the book was right, in its way…what did it mean by certain powers?"

"You can see me, yes?"

"Well, of course!"

"And my goblins?"

"Thank god. Yes. They'd have destroyed _everything_ by now, otherwise."

"Who else can?"

"…children," she said after a moment. "People in altered states of mind. My grandma, when she was dying – Didymus brought her a rose."

A fleeting grin unfurled itself across his face. "Good for Didymus; and there you have your answer."

"What, being put in the same league as kids and drunks?" She stuck out her tongue at him. "Thanks a lot!"

"Piffle. They see more than most are comfortable with; the mind's capability to deceive itself is second to none, and 'what you don't know can't hurt you' is possibly the most inane phrase ever to enter the vernacular." His hand forsook the tea; for half a heartbeat, she thought it would reach for hers. "So…I gave you the gift of first sight, so you might see what is truly there."

"…thank you," she answered, quietly, after a moment's reflection and a sip of tea. "You make good tea."

That earned a glimmer of a real smile. "I know."

"Braggart."

"Honest."

"_Honest_ braggart."

"Much better."

In the half-light, she smiled easily, and leaned back into the couch, enjoying her tea. Sometime when she hadn't been paying attention, the warmth had returned. She couldn't begin to say she minded; nor, glancing sideways at Jareth, no longer either worrying at his tea or staring dead-eyed into the distance, did she think he did.


	10. Chapter 10

Jareth found her in the kitchen, doing dishes, at ten at night. She couldn't say she hadn't been expecting him awake; the bottle of painkillers had stood untouched on the nightstand since he regained enough coherency to make his own decisions (she suspected they'd never worked at all,) and she knew he didn't sleep well, or often. Even so she had figured him upstairs, reading (or pretending to read, the book on his knee held open by a lifeless hand,) resigned to another long night, not…down here, hovering hesitantly in the doorway, oddly shy and painfully insubstantial in Andrew's baggy Batman pajamas.

She raised an eyebrow at him, but said nothing, and went back to the dishes. She had made cookies with Jo; a veritable mountain of dirty dishes occupied the counter to the left of the sink. Whatever Jareth wanted, he could damn well speak up about it.

The running water very nearly drowned it out, when he did. Irritably, she shut off the faucet.

"What was that?"

"I asked if life is always this bewildering," he repeated, quietly and with the strained calm if profound tiredness.

Sarah nodded thoughtfully as she scrubbed the baked-on cheese of the last few days' dinner from Karen's old casserole. She listened under the water's murmur for the thud of a rubber-tipped cane or the creak of a floorboard; any indication that he'd vacated the doorway. She finished the casserole and put it in the right-hand sink with the other dishes to be rinsed; amazing, how many dishes three people who cooked as little as possible could produce. She picked up a cookie sheet to scrub and then, because apparently it needed saying, she said,

"Yes."

Perhaps there came a quiet sound o acknowledgement, or pain. After a moment, the floorboard did creak, but, to her surprise, not in retreat. She half-listened around the noise of her scouring pad as he crossed the kitchen, laboriously careful with one stockinged foot and a walking stick on the slick tile floor, to stand beside her. Her elbow almost hit him as she placed the cookie sheet atop the casserole.

Except that she didn't put it there at all, because he took it. She boggled at him as surprise overwhelmed her brief annoyance at having him in her personal space. She stared as he rinsed it, considered the bare counter beside the sink, put it back on the casserole, one-handedly retrieved and spread a hand towel, re-rinsed the sheet, put it on the towel, and moved on to take care of the casserole.

Right about then her brain caught up and she returned to washing dishes. It didn't take long for the oddity of having someone to pass them to to wear off. She'd done the same with Karen, Erin and Andrew, and commenced teaching Jo. It just startled her, every time, to see Jareth instead of any of them, from the corner of her eye; to catch herself on the verge of making a joke only Erin would get, or hearkening back to an argument with Karen so old that it had become ritual.

Every now and again, she stole a glance at him. He worked steadily. She pretended not to notice how his hand shook, sometimes; nor did she watch his hand much at all. There is little to be read in a damp leather gardening glove.

In fact, she said nothing to him at all, save to request he dry and put away the glass mixing bowl, rather than leave it out to dry. She saw some battle waged in his expression, some maelstrom to which she could put no name. The least she could do was to leave him his pride, and give him a burner to dry when that pride threatened to crumple. He took the burner, the thick leather glove making him clumsy even as it protected him from the iron, and dried it meticulously. By the time he finished, his shoulders had squared again.

When she passed him the last dish and offered an encouraging smile, she could tell he tried to return the gesture. It came out far too sad. By then, the battle had ended, whatever it had been, and left in its wake a bleak calm. She almost hugged him, but remembered that stubborn pride and instead offered, quietly as the hour demanded,

"Thank you. Get some rest, okay?"

"You as well, Sarah."

His hand lifted a little, as if to touch hers; she began to reach out, in solidarity or reassurance, then thought better of it, shook herself, and went upstairs, while he let his hand drop. The thick leather almost let her pretend she had not seen his thin fingers curl in on themselves. This was _Jareth_, not Erin or Andrew or Jo. Not like them. Not human. Not even an affectionate, accessible non-human like her friends, or any of the goblins.

That night, she dreamed again of Erin.


	11. Chapter 11

A/N: Two tonight, because ten's short.

She returned from work the next day, expecting to find him upstairs brooding and Jo, out of breath at her desk, pretending she'd been doing homework all along. Instead, she opened the door to a discussion of nines.

"No, I'm quite serious; whatever you multiply a nine by, the number will be that number minus one, and then whatever you would add to it to equal nine. Having you on about such things is your mother's job. Just ask her." Jareth smiled beatifically up from his seat on the couch. "Hello, Sarah."

"Hi, mom!" Jo's gap-toothed grin didn't even aim for innocence. "Is he telling the truth?"

"Yes," blurted Sarah, thinking of nines; Jareth smiled smugly.

"I told you she messes you about."

"I thought you meant the nines!"

"It's okay, mom. I know you mess with me. Dad says parents are ob-…og-…ogli-?"

"Obligated," Sarah and Jareth answered simultaneously, then shot each other glances respectively astonished and seraphic.

"That!" crowed Jocelyn, and added, carefully, "Obligated. I am _obligated_ to remember 'obligated.'"

"Yes," Sarah laughed, "And here you go." She slipped her daughter a quarter for her New (Non-Curse) Word Jar, and hugged her. "Now go put it away. And get a cookie. And get _me_ a cookie while you're at it, please. Jareth?"

"Mmm?"

"Cookie?"

"Please, and thank you."

"Okay!" Jo scampered off; Sarah smiled fondly after her, then hung her briefcase on the coat rack and crossed the living room in order to flop bonelessly into the recliner opposite the couch. Jareth bared his teeth in a fleeting worried smile, which she returned with warmth that evidently took him by surprise.

"You two were having fun, weren't you?"

"We were, rather." He offered a smile more than a bit like that of someone expecting anger, while his hand picked nervously at a stray scrap of scratch paper.

Not for the first time, she wondered how he would react to offered affection; unless she imagined it, he leaned a little into her grin. Then again, she knew herself to be conjecturing wildly, especially as his expression looked rather pinched. This suddenly clicked into place when he rubbed his temples. She blurted a laugh.

"You're farsighted!"

He froze, then very slowly and deliberately lowered his hand and raised an acerbically questioning eyebrow. Sarah had the decency to blush, but couldn't help laughing in delight (and, perhaps, a bit of triumph) at such a humanizing touch.

"You're…you need reading glasses. Spectacles." She mimed it. He just kept looking at her in increasingly sardonic skepticism and, at that point, it occurred to her that he was having her on.

"Oh, come on! You know exactly what I mean," she laughed, failing to either feign exasperation or find a wayward pillow to fling at him. He allowed himself a slow, smug grin.

"Well, yes."

"Yes to which?"

"Both." The grin spread.

"Why didn't you_ say_ anything!"

"I…doubt you have the lens I require." Just like that, he'd gone away again, separated by a wary distance. For once, she took her time to watch the man across from her, rather than the twenty-five-year-old memory of one or two hours among thirteen. It had been so much easier, with him unconscious.

He watched her, edgily, all but perching on the sofa with his usable hand poised to push off. It forced her to confront what she'd known for a long time – Jareth was scared, no, _terrified_, and had been for such a long time that he'd grown too weary from it to muster much more than stiff, bleak wariness. She had to forcibly remind herself who he was to keep from sitting down by him and holding him as long as he would let her.

He'd drawn inward; a lesser individual, she thought, would have curled entirely, like a spider dying. He had even forced himself to find some morbid fascination in a blank segment of the rug. The poor scratch paper lay entirely shredded upon the sofa. His hand still tattered it absently, trembling.

"Jareth."

He flinched at the sound of her voice, and didn't shutter his expression quite in time for the hunted, haunted thing inside to stay safe in the dark.

"We can get you glasses."

"I'm sure you can." Forced, his dry smile came brittle as desert soil. Sarah squashed a surge of frustration. He did _not_ make it easy.

"They sell them at Wal-Greens. There's one near here. I'll get Jo." She'd decided not to offer him a choice on this, or they' be arguing all night. He twitched back into the cushions as she brushed past. She told herself that she'd imagined the tiny choked sound her sudden departure wrung out of him. She could _not_ get into that now.

Jo almost collided with her on the way out of her room. Sarah swept her up into a hug, spun her around, and ruffled her hair as she set her down.

"Hey, little kitty, you want to get changed? We need to go run a few errands."

"But I just finished my homework and I wanna read! And eat cookies with Jareth. And I'm not kitty anymore."

"Sorry, sweetie. I forget that was last year. And I know you want to read, and I'm glad…tell you what. We'll stop on the way back and you can pick out a book. Okay?"

Jo's mouth dropped into an excited "o" and she squeaked "Thank you!" before bolting. Sarah deflated a little as she methodically continued her search of the restroom for the palest foundation she owned. Bribing Jo with books would spoil her no less than doing so with toys, but she couldn't bring herself to say, instead, "Jareth will be coming too."

She grabbed the foundation with an unwarranted wrath, to give her sudden sorrow an example to turn to. Jareth, sitting small and silent on the couch, more than provided. She plopped brusquely onto the sofa's arm, tucked his hair back firmly, and had taken several swipes of makeup toward hiding the markings at the corner of his eyes before he quite caught up with the course of events.

"What…are you doing?"

"Covering them. These are _not_ something we can pass as normal."

"_Don't_."

His gloved hand covered hers. Anger, she'd expected; anger she found, along with a touch of pleading, but mostly inarguable resolved. She wasn't winning this one, and she didn't know whether to be frustrated or grateful.

Of course, she tried anyway. She met resistance from a thin hand; under the heavy leather glove, his bones felt narrower than pencils, and the sinews thin and strong as guitar strings. His gaze, fierce and pleading, would have seared her, had she let it.

"Please," he rasped, hoarsely. She sighed, gave his hand a brief squeeze and let go just as Jo thundered downstairs. Dread precipitated into determination. Either this would work, or it wouldn't.


	12. Chapter 12

It went, of course. It went _awkwardly_, but she'd expected that. She drove; it was Friday and busy and took up most of her concentration. In the back seat, Jo chattered. Beside Sarah, Jareth sat very silent and very still, his eyes stark and staring in a face as colourless as the day she found him. He looked like a dead owl.

They all piled out in the Wal-Greens parking lot. Jareth immediately came very close to falling back in as another care hurtled past, far too fast and blaring pop music. Sarah had to explain to Jo why you do not yell at drivers (at least when you're a pedestrian) and, inside, directed everyone to go find what they needed. Jo immediately scurried off to see if anything in the bizarre and meager toy aisle warranted the attention of her piggy bank. By the time Sarah had looked away, Jareth had vanished. She gave a philosophical mental shrug and went to retrieve necessities.

Jo trotted back eagerly after a bit, bearing – Sarah groaned inwardly – a package of sticky spiders. For two dollars. Which she could, thus, afford. Oh well.

Despite her sincere expectation of having to search for Jareth, he put in an appearance just in time. She and Jo had found a place in line and, turning to ask Jo to locate him, she found him at – and very nearly _with_ – her elbow, a ghostly figure in big, thin-rimmed glasses that did nothing to diminish the owliness. His presence startled her so badly she almost hit him.

"Nice glasses," she allowed, forcing a half-grin.

He offered the sickliest smile she'd ever seen and such a tiny miserable sound that she hadn't the heart to harass him very much about the grandpa glasses. They all but fell into her hand when she took them from him to pay for them; he very nearly did, too. She scowled at him, while the cashier scanned their things, but she did not think he saw. She doubted he saw anything in the outside world at all, and very nearly hated him for it, but knew it for resentment of the situation as a whole.

Outside, she shoved the glasses into his hand and breezed past to the car while he fumbled to keep from dropping them and stay up with Jo's chatter. Jo had decided (of course) to attach herself to him, rattling brightly on about spiders and stars. That did not help Sarah's mood. She beat them both to the car and watched them from the rear-view mirror. Jo looked vibrant, gesticulating and chattering as she walked backward to let her companion keep pace. Jareth, by contrast, looked like a man already dead.

By the time they reached the bookstore, he'd turned a sick green and she could feel him shaking through the seat. She turned sharply to avoid a sudden bicycle and, mentally listing epitaphs, pulled into a narrow space. Inside, she delved – free of Jo, who had scurried off to the biology books and Jareth, who, thankfully, disappeared altogether – into the young adult section. In amongst the drivel lurked the occasional gem of something Worth Reading, such as a new novel by Holly Black or, in this case, the second part of Clive Barker's _Abarat_.

A cursory glance in either direction showed her quite alone. She hadn't cared since high school if anyone saw, but certain things are best done just so and thus she checked before opening the book, burying her face in the sleek pages and inhaling deeply. It smelled of vanillin and paper. Bliss stole through her. One glance at the bright, intricately stylized illustrations, and she was lost. She'd wanted this book for over a year, and Jo would be awhile with the spiders. She might even get a chance to read for a bit.

With renewed buoyancy, she struck out for the cluster of fat chairs at the back of the store. She'd spend some time reading, and buy the book and whatever Jo picked out, then go home and order dinner and damn well eat it with no further drama.

Given Murphy's Law, she almost sat on Jareth. It was easier than it sounded; he formed a very small tangle of dark cloth upon one of those fat chairs, punctuated only by his shock of pale hair. He flinched violently away from her, gaunt hand grasping helplessly after a book which thudded dully to the floor.

Sarah stared musingly at it for the space of a few heartbeats, feeling very cold and very taut. She crossed the floor to it, stooped down, carefully picked it up, and very deliberately smacked it back into his lap. He twitched as if she'd kicked him.

"Jareth." She braced her hands on each arm of the chair. He only huddled further back against it. So fed up it made her ill, she seized him by the jaw and wrenched his face up toward hers. Even then, he would only look down, presenting her with a mask.

"You need to stop this. It's not endearing or attractive and I'm really running low on patience. I get enough theatrics from the seven-year-old."

Her voice didn't even sound like hers; it put her in mind of times in the past she'd been so angry or upset she felt as if she stood four feet back from her body, watching herself. Dissociation, Erin would call it.

Jareth swallowed hard, making his throat spasm against the side of her hand, and made as if to pull away. She tightened her grip and tugged him hard back toward her.

"I don't know what the _hell_ happened to you but," but if I don't know, I can't help, she thought; not that you'd want that, her mind added bitterly, "but it can't begin to justify a grown person carrying on like this in public."

"I, I'm sorry," he choked, shaking so much the chair under him rattled against the floor. "I can't…"

"Oh for heaven's sake, spit it out!" Her hand smacked briefly against the arm of the chair. He lurched backward with a strangled cry and refrained from curling in on himself only by painfully visible effort.

"The, the…the car, the metal and steel, the noise, I'm sorry, I'll, I, I'm sorry…" Gibbering had run down to a retched whisper and he'd wadded up like a dying spider, his crumpled outline interrupted by the awkward jut of splinted limbs. Sarah let her hands slowly lower to her sides.

"You're scared of cars?"

He swallowed hard, forcing a convulsive nod.

"It…it hit me. I'm sorry."

The hot tight bubble of rage deflated abruptly, taking her energy with it. Sarah found herself kneeling, one hand brushing back dry hair from a face grey with terrified despair. She searched for contact there, in his blindly staring eyes, or at least some semblance of something to hold on to.

"That's how you got hurt? You got hit by a car?"

He nodded jerkily; he still wouldn't look at her. Entirely without her consent, her other hand reached out to pull him close. Halfway, she caught and recalled it. It closed regretfully, echoing his dying spider but without the brokenness.

"I'm sorry…do you think you can make it home?"

At that, he did look up. Horror had worn his masks away. Such raw, bitter pain stared out of his eyes that for one awful second she thought he'd start laughing and not stop until his throat gave out. He just bit his lip, though, and closed his eyes and nodded. After a moment he added, hoarsely, "Thank you."

She allowed herself a fleeting touch to his shoulder, offering reassurance. Later, she'd realise she'd never seen anyone so bewildered at such simple affection.

Because she very nearly had to carry him inside, she'd figured he would go to bed, or at least ostensibly do so as an excuse for privacy. If so, she couldn't begin to blame him for it. Showing weakness in company had always bothered her too, and she didn't mind giving him space – and she herself felt awful for snapping at him.

Instead, he stayed downstairs for dinner, then lingered in the living room to read with Jo, who was worried about him almost to tears. Sarah found herself glad Jo was not much older; seven years of life do not thoroughly equip one to decipher the subtleties of nonverbal cues. An older child would not have been at all reassured by the grey-faced figure hugging her close and alternately reading to her in a voice whose calm trembled about the edges, and listening to her read with eyes closed as if he wished they'd never open again.

Sarah read, and brought them both hot chocolate; _Abarat_ proved a useful shield, when she caught herself melting at Jo's strong little tan hands over Jareth's thin, scarred one, helping hold his mug steady. She reburied herself, beaming, and soon lost track of time.

"Sarah," said a quiet, clipped voice. She started out of the book, blinking away a dazzle of colourful words and paintings. Across the room, Jareth grinned tiredly at her and lifted his hand to show Jo asleep against him.

Sarah felt her face relax into a smile and, stretching, walked across the room and gathered her daughter into her arms. Jo nestled close, murmuring in her sleep; Sarah accidentally caught Jareth's gaze, unintentionally sharing with him a moment of deep affection for the person in her arms. Perhaps by that contact, a bit of it spread.

She freed one hand for a few heartbeats, and smoothed his hair back gently, letting her hand come to rest lightly on his shoulder. To her surprise, after the initial wince, he leaned into her; she beamed a little, gently rubbing her thumb along the hem of his collar.

"I'll come back for you, okay…?"

"All right."

She stared, bemused, at the face leaned into her, hair softly brushing her forearms; he'd turned to nuzzle into her hand and his lashes tickled the heel of her palm. Warmly ethereal, birdlike, his breath curled in her cupped fingers. She stroked a fingertip along his cheekbone and felt him sigh raggedly and nuzzle close.

At last she pulled away, reluctantly. Jo had grown very heavy in her arms and the house felt close and safe in the half-light. Upstairs, she kissed Jo between the eyes as she tucked her in, and smoothed the coverlet over her. It was seven years old, decked out in princesses and rather worn; she was due a new one…perhaps a new bedroom set altogether. Sarah had decided her room and Jo's were up next for renovation – she and Andrew had bought the house as a fixer-upper, or it would have landed far beyond their price range. Next had been the guest room, with its door that locked from outside and its difficult windows, but that had been before Jareth.

Mind abuzz with plans, she whisked downstairs two steps at a time and, at the bottom, decided to have mercy on Jareth. He looked like a man trying valiantly not to fall apart. Startling him, in light of that, seemed a bit cruel. Even so, though she didn't sneak by any means, he flinched before melting into her hand on his arm.

"You look pretty beat," she informed him, gently.

"So do you." He conjured a tired, toothy grin that cracked around the edges. "Are you wishing to retreat to your lair with a good book?"

"Yeah. I'll be up for a few hours yet, though." She frowned thoughtfully at him. "Are you up to something?"

"Eternally." She'd earned another ghostly smirk; she couldn't begin to find it threatening, with his hand resting lightly and mothlike on hers, and his cheek leaned upon her arm. Musingly, a bit fondly, she stroked his hair, and was rewarded as some tension in him eased, leaving him drained bonelessly against her and the couch in equal measure, looking profoundly weary and anxious, but a touch less pained. She kept petting him, firmly shoving her own bemusement aside.

"What exactly are you plotting, o wicked one?"

His shoulders tensed again.

"If I am to do this…life….I shall need some form of identification. Paperwork. Utterly nefarious, I know."

Sarah smiled ruefully, scratching behind his ear. She'd been doing it while he spoke; the way his voice kept trailing off, then rallying, struck her as rather endearing.

"Unspeakably evil. I guess you don't have anything to begin with."

"Not at all. People can barely see me."

For all she'd noticed earlier, in the stores, it hurt to hear it stated so baldly. It formed a distinct improvement from invisibility but – she startled herself less than she expected, in thinking so – he deserved better. She wanted badly to hug him.

"We'll figure out what to do. It'll be all right."

"I know what to do," he interrupted, voice rapidly cooling from desperate to dry. "I simply…" He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, schooling his face once more into a blank, "I need your help."

"How so?"

"An old ally of mine has access to the wherewithal to such things." He took a steadying breath, claws gleaming dully in the dimness as he flexed his hand. "I cannot contact him, now. Sarah, please, if you would be so kind…?"

She glanced sideways at him, past the bleak landscape of sharp features and sheer cussedness to the gulf of unhappiness he tried so hard to keep to himself.

"In the mirror?"

"Yes."

Biting her lip, Sarah stood. She clenched her hands behind her back to keep from simply scooping him up – it took him what seemed a full five minutes to lever himself upright, but he wouldn't look at her and his spine formed a stiff line of stubborn pride. Perhaps, she decided, she'd bounded down the stairs earlier in some prescient attempt to make up for taking ten minutes to climb them now. If anything, the hallway went more slowly yet.

Two thirds of the way down, she topped and, looking back, discovered that she'd lost him at the restroom door, peering from her to the countertop mirror with an eyebrow raised in eloquent silent inquiry. She mentally buried her face in her hand.

"Won't it be better in a full-length?"

"Yes."

"Keep coming, then. There's one in my room."

Another brief battle showed in his face before he quelled it and followed her. She bowed him through the doorway ahead of her and slipped in past him while he looked around. The dim illumination of street lamps and moonlight through her window left his expression inscrutable.

"Do you want a light on?"

"No. This is best done by moonlight." Even in the near-dark, his smile looked forced. "Please."

She nodded slowly, biting her lip to dam words born of sudden nervous courtesy. If he wanted a seat, he would have taken one, on the bed or the squashy chair beside it, but he stood, shaking, determined, with ramrod spine and very nearly squared shoulders. The right looked like a dog-eared page. In the dark, he seemed very small and pale and terribly proud. They had not come here for pleasantries, anyway. Best to get it done.

"What do I say?"

"He is Zharko, the Troll King; he owes me a debt." Jareth's smile glimmered a bitter crescent. "You'll know what to say."

Sarah considered for a moment, caught in half a heartbeat on the cusp of fear and anticipation, feeling fifteen again, wishing upon the Goblin King in her parents' neatly appointed bedroom. Then she squared her shoulders and stared her reflection in the eyes. Behind her in the dark, he showed as a narrow, luminous blur. Her reflection stared steadily back at her.

"Zharko, King of Trolls, I call you on behalf of Jareth of the Labyrinth." She considered, then pronounced "Come before the next three minutes turn, or consider yourself in his debt for another hundred years."


	13. Chapter 13

Nothing happened. Sarah stood in the dim room, squinting grumpily into the mirror at the myriad of lanterns and fireflies, amulets and keys, bats and bottlecaps and bird skulls, gleaming from the corners of her eyes and the nook beside nightstand. Then a pair of flames squinted back at her and something huge shifted in her brain, hinging on the fact that her room contained no lanterns or fireflies, far less any of the rest.

"I'm sure you do, darling," murmured the resonant voice behindbeforeabovearound her. Her body betrayed her with a twitch; she almost screamed, but instead focused upon those two points of light and forced herself to look at them not as flames but as eyes dark and knowing, deep-set in a hook-nosed, sardonic face adorned with a dramatic moustache and framed by a wild mane of restless black snakes. Zharko's smile carved a crescent in the night. The slow flare of her resentment answered in kind.

"What does the dandelion ask?"

"He would…" Sarah took a deep, calming breath. The Troll King in her mirror, in her mirror that _fit in her room_, stood at least nine feet tall; his bare feet, constructed more like a cat's than a man's, ended in hooked claws the length of her hand and the black snakes had resolved themselves into curly hair that stirred restlessly under what she somehow knew to be a crackling vastness of magic. She did not want to look away from him but she made herself turn instead to Jareth and lifted an eyebrow expectantly.

"Identification papers, in the fashion of the Above, under the name Jareth Kavanagh."

Sarah felt Zharko's slow grin from her fingertips to the marrow of her bones. She didn't look at him, though. Jareth stood bright and fragile as any of the Troll King's myriad candle flames; she doubted that infinitely sardonic stare would snuff him out, but decided she'd feel rather awful abandoning him to it just to watch.

"And the rest is up to me?"

The former Goblin King bared his teeth in a smile like a cornered cat. She moved in the strange crowded darkness to place herself obliquely between him and the Troll King.

"Male. Age…?" She had not expected Jareth to look to her for information.

"Thirty-nine," Sarah answered after a moment's surprised hesitation. "Height, about five foot ten." What the hell else would he need? She cast wildly about in her mind for recollection of what exactly goes into legal ID; did her driver's license list her blood type? "Um, eyes…eyes blue, blonde hair. I think that's it."

A glance between them showed Jareth's face a mask and Zharko's all inscrutable amusement; his smile turned, perhaps, a bit warm as he bowed to her.

"As the lady seems sensible, I believe we shall stick with that. Dabbling in the Above, Jareth?"

"Not even in the slightest. You know what happened."

"Courting Sarah?" She thought he grinned, under the moustache.

"No." Jareth's voice cracked like bird bones. "You _know_, Zharko."

The Troll King's laughter enveloped the room; it ruffled Sarah's hair and sent shivers down her spine and, as it slipped out through the cracks, it took the lights with it, even the street lamps, even the moon, leaving the room cave-dark just long enough for panic to stir before Sarah's eyes registered the return of dim, normal lighting through the window. For an irrational moment she questioned if she'd imagined its absence.

She found herself shaking, in relief or helpless rage she didn't know; she'd been afraid, and nothing made her angrier than fear. Furiously, she ran a hand back through her hair, cracked her knuckles, grated her teeth and forced herself to breathe.

A hand touched her arm. She almost screamed and, whirling, clawing hands raised to rake her attacker's eyes, found herself face-to-face with Jareth, a figure of ashes and moonlight with shadows under his eyes fit to bury cities in. His gaunt hand still lingered, hesitant and crestfallen, in the space beside her arm. He tried to summon a smile for her; it failed, but she appreciated the effort.

"Thank you, Sarah."

"You're…you're welcome. God. What an absolutely brain-flattening person."

His laugh rasped painfully.

"Zharko has turned people to stone by thinking about glaring at them."

"I'll fucking believe it. Christ on a goat."

"…a goat?"

"Yes. A goddamn goat. I need a drink. Jareth, do you want a drink?"

"I think that might be a good idea," he answered greyly, swaying.

"Oh, I'm just full of 'em." She tossed a wobbly smile over her shoulder as she headed for the door and, in so doing, caught his gaze, all pained ruefulness and bitter amusement. He hadn't moved an inch. The hand he held out to her trembled a bit with effort; he still stood stiffly straight but she read entreaty in his face.

"Please…?"

The frantic white noise of awe/rage/relief subsided in a quiet tide of empathy. Floorboards creakily proclaimed her progress across the room back to him. The day had left him shaking so hard she had to help wrap his arm around her shoulders. That accomplished, she hugged him tightly and without warning. In the circle of her arms he stood rigid and trembling, caught; on the verge of letting him go, saddened and hurt at his reaction, she felt him lean into her, just a little.

One of them made a small sound. She thought it might have been her, since he'd so taken her by surprise. Almost absently she ran a hand down his back, feeling the ridged tissue of old scars under his shirt – some obviously won in battle or inflicted in captivity and, carved over the former and marred by the latter, the pattern of a great maze, obviously quite deliberate. When he'd been delirious, it had been hot to the touch. Now, even through the cloth, it was cold. She gently traced its course and smoothed down the delicate knobs of his spine and, so doing, realised he had leaned his head on her shoulder. For the second time that day, she felt his lashes soft against her skin, and the warmth of his breath curled, small and vulnerable, against her.

She found it oddly welcome, after so long apart from her family and without a lover. To pull away took significant resolve. Perhaps it made her a bad person, but she quietly thanked the very long day for the necessity of keeping an arm around his waist and taking the hall and stairway very slowly. He leaned on her heavily enough to leave her quite certain that without her, he wouldn't have made it out of the room. To someone so tired and hurt, who had been whole and powerful when last he encountered Zharko, the Troll King must have been doubly overwhelming.

Downstairs in the living room, she flipped the light on as soon as she'd helped him onto the big recliner – then, upon her return from the kitchen with a bottle in one hand and two long-stemmed glasses in the other, just as hastily turned it back off. Jareth shot her a questioning look.

"It felt wrong."

He nodded slowly.

"Yes. He is very…Other, and it lingers."

"That's…that's one way to put it." She turned her glass pensively. "It's like ozone. Like the feeling after a storm. It doesn't even have to be malicious. It's just a lot bigger than you are, and nothing at all like you." She looked up from her wine – the colour of flax seeds, of gold under moonlight, of Jareth's hair, when he had still been king – at his pale face full of quiet, terrible grief and something closely akin to longing.

"I'm sorry," she blurted, but he spoke first.

"Thank you."

He bowed his head to take a sip of wine. The delicate webwork of bruised eyelids shut her out; dark lashes feathered against bloodless skin sealed the distance. Her hand curled into a fist tight enough to choke regret. In silence, she finished her wine.


	14. Chapter 14 Part 1

Three days later, Jo broke the plumbing. That wasn't the start of the incident, either, though at first Sarah thought it was. Why else would she have been greeted at the door by a suspiciously helpful seven-year-old who, upon her discovery of an equally suspicious closed door to an empty restroom, insisted her invisible friend was in the bath? Jo's last invisible friend had departed two years past.

Things gelled when she let herself in, only for her foot to discover a poorly mopped up and rapidly regenerating pool of questionable water beside the overflowing toilet. Unfortunately, aforementioned things included the fact that she'd let Jo borrow her cell phone before departing on her evening walk.

Jo, once called on it, came clean; she'd dropped the phone and broken it and then, in panic, flushed it, whereupon the toilet voiced its objection. Sarah considered her for a long moment; Jareth, attracted by the commotion and wisely holding his peace, lingered in the doorway. Jo could not begin to fix the mess – indeed, Sarah wondered if _she_ could. Exasperated, she pinched the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath.

"Jocelyn Laura Williams. As you might have guessed, you are in deep crap."

Jo whimpered.

"I can't ask you to fix the toilet, because that's a job for a grown up, and maybe even a plumber. I'm also not going to ground you from reading, because I want you to read." That got a childish sigh of relief followed by a sharp intake of breath as dread reasserted itself. "However, you are going to pay for my new cell phone, from your allowance, and you aren't going to get your dad or grandparents to help you."

"But I-"

"No buts. Now please go to your room. I'm really frustrated and I don't want to yell at you."

Pinching the bridge of her nose, she decided, seemed to relieve some of the pressure in her head. No wonder Jareth made a habit of it. With face buried in hand, she listened to Jo sink off, then, at last, persuaded herself to peer between her fingers at the disaster on the floor.

"And, thanks to this, the Bog of Eternal Stench has competition."

"No. It smells far worse. And it's self-sustaining."

"I wouldn't brag, if I were you. Here's a rag. Help me mop."

"And the stench is, in fact, eternal."

"Smartass."

"Some portion of me has to have a brain. If you'd like to investigate the plumbing, I'll finish wiping up the, ah…bog."

She groaned a laugh. "Thank you, Jareth. I'll be right back with the wrench and some gloves."

"Gloves?" He directed an eloquent look from his heavily clad hands to her.

"Latex gloves." A blank stare greeted her. "You wouldn't know what those are. Seriously though. I'll be right back."

He, damp and tousled, sitting on the edge of the tub, welcomed her with an expression of regal distaste worthy of a cat with a faceful of citrus.

"Those are _remarkably_ hideous gloves, Sarah."

"Yep! You want your leather gloves covered in piss, your majesty?"

"…No. Thank you."

He accepted the yellow plastic things and, to Sarah's annoyance, gave her no chance to help him put them on. Still, he managed it, which came with a great sense of relief and a smaller one of pride. Maybe when she got the bandages off, he'd actually have a functional hand underneath.

While she would have thought he'd resent being the "hold this, pass me that" person of the project, he proved not only amenable but outright curious, which provided its own set of problems. Sarah had inherited her father's talent for fiddling around with mechanical things til they resumed working; this did not qualify to her to explain the whys and wherefores of plumbing to a former Goblin King, which is why dinnertime found them both in an escalating state of dishabille and temper.

"I don't know!" she exclaimed furiously, rounding on him so fast he almost fell into the bath tub. "I don't know _what _it's called or what it's supposed to do, far less the technical name for _either_! As you've probably noticed, I'm just cussing at it til it makes sense."

"And have been. For an hour and a half."

"Agh! Just lay off, I've just about got it!"

"Oh dear. I wonder why _that_ sounds familiar?"

"Hush, you." It started as a snap and ended as a snap with some fondness to it. She ripped off a glove, mopped back damp hair with her newly freed hand, blinked once, slowly, and stared at the toilet. Behind and beside her, she felt him do the same.

"I think…I think we ought to just go to Lowe's and ask."

"How, precisely, would cattle noises be of assistance?"

She traded staring at the toilet for staring at Jareth while his words took their sweet time percolating through sodden layers of frustration.

"…Oh!" A slightly unhinged laugh slipped out of her. "Oh, Lowe's! It's a home improvement store. Hardware and such."

"I already rec-"

"-recommended it an hour ago. I know, I know. _Hush_."

"I didn't say a thing."

"You thought it." She compressed her lips to keep from grinning. "Loudly. Asshole."

"Mom?" queried a meek voice from the doorway, startling her but, she got a ruefully exasperated feeling, not Jareth. She steeled herself for the inevitable awkwardness of conversing with a child you've just cussed in front of.

"Yes, sweetie?"

Upon realizing she was not on the receiving end of a double-barreled fit of crankiness, Jo relaxed a little.

"I'm hungry."

"You're…oh, crap, yes, it's dinner time, isn't it. I'll order something for you and Jareth before I go, okay?"

"Sarah…?"

"Oh, _god_. What?"

"I would like to come, if that's all right."

No, it isn't! she screamed inside her head. If you come then I'll need to wait for you to get changed, and we'll need to take Jo because I can't leave her at home with you if you come _with_ me, and it will take _forever_ and everyone's tired and grumpy already.

She didn't say so. Instead, she just regarded him, reflecting upon his terror of cars and resolve to learn how to live Above- and tried _not_ to remember him telling her that an Underground monarch severed from their realm dies. In the end, she nodded abruptly.

"Yeah. Get changed. We'll get takeout on the way back."

The Lowe's employee she'd been forced to summon via customer service desk, because the only guaranteed way to avoid retail employees is to actually require one, had one of those droning monotones that left her with an overwhelming conviction that this young woman held a bright future teaching high school English. Then again, if she had to spend all day talking about toilet parts, she'd drone too.

"…now crank it down like _this_, and make sure it's on tight, or it will leak."

"All right. Thank you," and I never would have guessed that improperly connected pipes might leak, "You've been a real lifesaver." She squeezed the odd piece of hardware to make sure it hadn't vanished while Conversations With Bored Collegiates About Toilet Parts overqualified itself for the seventh circle of a really banal hell.

"You ready to go, Jo?"

"Yeah. I don't think I want to be a plumber when I grow up."

"Well, that's a relief. Let's get out of here – we both know how grumpy you get when I'm hungry. Where's Jareth?"

"Here. I found gloves." The gloves in question flopped across his extended palm; heavy white latex, patterned with intricate black vines and bordered in broad bands of magenta. They were the most ridiculous gloves she'd ever seen. Unfortunately, something in his voice told her it would be cruel to laugh.

"How much?"

"Five dollars." He cracked a smile. "They're reusable." Reusability made the price no less extortionate; still, it would not break the bank, and at five dollars, she could afford Jareth's vanity. It wasn't as if he had much else. The ridiculous gloves joined the plumbing in her hand basket. She didn't think the cashier bought her dry "they're for him."

Daylight, by then, had quite slunk off to other hemispheres, and the idea of devouring her own arm had acquired a certain quaint appeal. It was with considerable relief that she pulled into Burgerville's drive-through and ordered the largest burger on their menu, with fries and a milk shake to occupy any remaining empty spaces. Jo, as usual, ordered a fish sandwich and an orange soda; that had been her thing, lately.

"Jareth?"

"I'm quite all right." He looked green at her. "Thank you."

"Not without dinner, you're not. Pick something."

"If you insist." His reflection scowled musingly at the mirror for a moment; then he pronounced, all vengeful satisfaction, "Chicken sandwich."

Sarah very nearly snorted.

"Just a bit of a grudge, there?"

He held up his thumb and forefinger closer to touching than not.

"The tiniest smidgen."

"Chicken sandwich it is, then," she laughed, glad to have that over with.


	15. Chapter 14 Part 2

She'd give him this much credit; he really did try to eat the sandwich. Then again, by the time they got home, she'd lost any inclination either to blame him for not wanting it or to further fight with the toilet that night.

"Are you going to be okay?" she asked, for at least the fifth time.

"Always." Sharp teeth flashed in a rictus smile. "It's one of my many talents."

"Could've fooled me."

"About having talents?" He shot her a sardonic look severely impeded by glazed, unfocused eyes. She groaned a laugh and bodily lifted him up the stairs. The fact that he simply sagged bonelessly in her arms told her more than enough. As she ascended, she stoke a glance at the bloodless, grey-lipped face half-buried against her shoulder, expression taut with concentration or abstraction.

"…sure," she said softly, "let's go with that."

Yet another floorboard proclaimed its conversion to the Church of Creak as she rounded the corner into the guest room. So worried was she that it barely set her on edge. Carrying him should have differed a bit more from transporting an armful of silk scarves.

He stirred a little as she deposited him on the bed. Gently, she detached him and only just refrained from smoothing his hair back.

"Is it the iron?"

"Mmm?"

"The iron. In the store." And probably the sandwich, and everywhere else, though not as badly, she reminded herself. "Is that what got to you?"

After a hesitation he answered, quietly, "Yes."

Exasperation and empathy fought a brief battle which ended in a draw.

"Jareth…you _know_ how much we use iron Above. Especially in hardware. Steel is in _everything_."

"I know." He opened his eyes, very dark and as leached of colour by the bad lighting as his skin was by iron-sickness. "I need to stop being afraid."

Something (which she might have called her heart, had she been less sick of hackneyed metaphors,) wrenched painfully. She swallowed and turned away.

"I'll…I'll get the silver pills."

"Thank you."

Screaming jolted her from a dead sleep. She came to hurtling down the hall in stocking feet and scrabbled frantically to keep from sliding into a wall as she rounded the corner at the top of the steps. Some detached part of her told her she should be terrified; told her she shouldn't be taking the stairs five at the time; but she was moving too fast to listen and too fast for fear.

She was moving too fast to stop, too, and had to fling up her arms to deflect her collision with the far wall. That gave her brain a chance to catch up with her, at apparently the same pace at which she herself had caught up to the wall – a great crashing cacophony of realisations.

Not screaming, but the shriek of fire alarms, filled her house. She did not smell smoke – or at least, not the smoke of a burning home. A definite pungency of cigarettes lingered, overlying the scents of amber and wool, of wine and spices, of water and stone…since when did water and stone of a smell? She stood before the little table in her front hallway, centered in a pool of amber light from the ceiling-mounted lamp. All around her, black snowflakes fell softly to the floor.

Dazed, she stooped to pick one up. It drifted away from her. She had to snatch it from the air and pinch it, light and dry, between thumb and forefinger – a long, glossy black feather, still warm.

She transferred it to her palm and slowly stroked her thumb down its back. At some point while her mind took its time to wrap around the feathers, the alarms had ceased, leaving her alone with the dim gold light and deafening silence.

Sleep still muddled her senses. She'd drifted off in the guest room's desk chair, watching over Jareth. How long ago? Feeling more than a bit dreamy, she peered about for…what? Clocks that numbered to thirteen? A great black bird with sardonic eyes, watching her from atop the coat rack? Something creamy pale, resting on the dark wood table, caught her eye. She fumbled it up with sleep-numbed fingers and cussed softly as a smaller white rectangle immediately tumbled to the floor. She felt it hit her foot and bounce off, but had to bend down and grope about on the floor to find it.

The space behind her loomed very large and dark in her consciousness, simultaneously horribly empty and nowhere near empty enough. Every delicate knob of vertebrae in her spine made its presence known, solely to tell her how easy it would be to slice, crush, tear, stab, just _here_, like _so._ She knew the sounds on the stairs behind her, slow and arrhythmic, were just Jareth. She knew it. The knowledge did nothing to stifle the scream building so large behind her teeth that it threatened to choke her.

A few shreds of it escaped, jarred loose by relief as her fingers brushed the rough paper. She seized it, straightened, whirled and slammed on the lights in one motion, half-expecting the old nightmare, no lights coming on and the thing in the dark _springing on her –_

-but light flooded the hallway and the thing behind her, now before her, went down hard with a small cry of dismay and was just Jareth, cowering on the fifth stair up with his arm raised to shield his head, face half-averted and transformed into a mask of baffled, blinded terror. Maybe she'd passed on the nightmare, or maybe he'd had it all along.

The paranoia lingered, a cold cruel wire through her brain. She approached him warily and crouched down well out of reach, direly needing to make sure the dark panicked eyes in the death-white face really were Jareth's eyes.

Slowly, shakily, he lowered his hand a little to stare at her in barely comprehending horror. She wondered what he saw, in the place of her well-lit hallway, but at least she knew him for himself. By morning, her fears would seem ridiculous.

"Jareth?"

The remains of her trapped scream shredded out between his teeth as he recoiled; it still came out barely above a whisper. He actually looked at her then, though, and offered a wry, ragged "present" before closing his eyes and leaning back against the stairs.

"Sometimes, favours or no, I wish I could set the Cleaners on Zharko."

"Is that what…! Oh, good god, that spooky bastard." She took a deep breath and looked down at the envelopes in her hand, feeling blood suffuse her cheeks at the sheepish realization that she hadn't even bothered to look at them yet. The top, a thick crisp affair of creamy parchment bore, in bold harsh calligraphic slashes that left her thinking the Troll King used his formidable claws as nibs, "To Jareth." The smaller, which held on its own would have nestled comfortably in her palm, bore no writing at all, but only a pressed thistle affixed to the front with a silver pin.

Because it seemed the only thing to do, she offered him the big envelope. He took it with a shell-shocked care that both echoed hers and made her glad not to have tried to give him both. He would have dropped the little one.

Shaking a bit now that adrenaline had begun to wear off, she picked up the cane lying where it had fallen at the bottom of the stairs and held it out. If he noticed, he gave no sign; the envelope's contents had claimed his attention. When a gentle prod in the arm failed to elicit any reaction save to jolt him into removing the contents entirely, she gave up and, heaving a quiet sigh, sat down on the stair above him with the cane across her knees.

Silence slowly descended. By the time it enveloped them, it had stretched itself in. Sarah leaned in, trying to see over Jareth's shoulder but loath to touch him after mention of the Cleaners. She had no doubt the Troll King would find them a really grand joke; they still rattled her, though, after twenty-five years. This, she reminded herself, was why she could never allow herself to offer him affection or trust.

Any remaining willingness she might have had to make contact sizzled out of existence as he reflexively shuddered away. She mentally cursed him, and tilted her head to peer at the thing in his hand.

Just as she opened her mouth, he spoke, in a voice so taut that she barely recognized it.

"He sent me one of your…temporary identifications. A visa. He sent me a visa."

Sarah paused to sort out the significance of this. He had asked for identification papers; Zharko had provided. She held the visa and birth certificate in her hands now, solid and real; she even touched her steel pocket knife to it, to make sure. Wasn't what you were supposed to do, when some fae creature gives you a thing of value – touch it with iron, to see if it vanishes? Either the stories lied, or she held an actual visa.

When the import sunk in, it did so with a horrid solidity that knocked the breath out of her.

"When does it expire?" Oh, god, she thought – oh god, that's cruel, to give him something temporary, just when he's committed to living here. Trying to live here. Trying to live at all.

"One year." Something in him strangled his voice; what escaped had a scream around the edges, again. Sarah ran a slow hand through her hair, trying to pull out thoughts.

"Well," said a pragmatic voice she recognised as her own, "We'll have to get you naturalized. I don't know how green cards work, I think those are for employment. We'll figure something out, though." No response came from the figure next to her. "There's this, too."

After a bewildered delay, he accepted the smaller envelope, with which she'd gently nudged his hand. From it, three small white beads and a slip of paper tumbled into the heavily bandaged palm of his bad hand. Each bead was about the size of her thumbnail, each carved with a face – one laughing, one grieving, one inscrutable; the primeval forebears of the laughing-and-weeping theatre mask duo. It was with a reverent sort of calm that he set the envelope upon his bent knee and touched them, gently, with trembling fingertips.

His face formed a study of concentration as he unfolded the paper. This time, she could read over his shoulder.

"These are yours; they belong with you," read the elegant scratchy hand. "Love, Adrinn." It was not what she expected.

"Bone…?" she asked, softly. It took a great deal of self-control not to touch them.

"Bone." His voice came as a hoarse echo to hers.

"What sort?"

"Person."

Her smile froze; she flinched, snarled "_Whose_?"

"Mine," he informed her, some bitter irony informing his expression. "A captor, long before I was king, meant to hurt me with them. With his power to take them. So I took them back. I lost them, after Magrat sent me away."

She nodded slowly, staring between him and the beads while she mused upon everything left unsaid in a statement that, even so, comprised more than he'd told her previously in the entire time he'd been living in her guest room.

"And Adrinn?" It would not do to touch the beads or the note. Instead, she touched his hand, un-gloved for once, ghastly pale, silver about the tips from iron sickness. To her surprise, it neither twitched away from nor leaned into hers. "Who is Adrinn?"

"He is a Duke in Zharko's court." He smiled painfully at someone only he could see. "He enjoys astronomy, and harbours a secret passion for white wine and racy novels. I think he can find something to love in absolutely anyone."

"Anyone?" She lifted an eyebrow. Jareth unfurled a mocking smirk.

"He loved me for three hundred years."

"You're right," she muttered, remembering the Cleaners. "Poor Adrinn."


	16. Chapter 16

Thursday descended into dusk in shades of gold and indigo, accented with a pale moon. Sarah cleared the dishes – out of leftovers and unwilling to get takeout _again_, she'd been forced to cook – with a sense of serenity. Dinner, though emphatically mediocre on an empirical basis, had been considerably improved by Jo's conversation. She'd found a guide to spiders of the Northwest at the school library and, with Jareth still in bed from the iron-sickness, waxed eloquent at Sarah about it.

She found herself slowly relaxing under the child's attention – Jareth had almost led her to forget what it felt like to have her daughter to herself and, while she couldn't begrudge him what affection he could find, the feeling came as a relief. She'd never considered herself a jealous person, she mused, as she deposited a saucepan in the sink. Like a low-grade headache, it had snuck up on her.

Jo trailed in from the kitchen, bearing their plates and the tail end of a ramble about spiders.

"-and most house spiders can't even bite you, and they're _supposed_ to be inside because they adopted that way."

"Adapted, sweetie. Did you get the cups?"

"Mhm! Can I go upstairs and read now?"

"I don't know." Sarah smiled over her shoulder as she turned on the tap. "Can you?"

"…_may_ I?"

Laughing, she knelt and pulled Jo into a hug.

"Absolutely. I'll bring up snack in an hour, okay?"

"Okay! I love you, mommy."

She gave Sarah a kiss on the cheek and darted off before she had a chance to respond, either to the kiss or to the first time in a year she'd been mommy instead of mom. Beaming, she touched the spot Jo had kissed, as if to rub it in, then rose to do the dishes.

The phone chose that moment to shrill obnoxiously. She sighed and resigned a few moments of her evening to dealing with a telemarketer. No point in being rude to someone just doing their distinctly unexciting job.

"Hello?"

"Good evening, Sarah! Do you have a moment?"

"Of course!" Ebullience came rushing back. "Of course I have time, Karen! Thank you for asking, though. How have you been?"

"I have been running around like a madwoman! Your father's insisting on building a boat in the garage, did he manage to tell you or did he email you gibberish again?"

"Gibberish. He uses acronyms only he understands."

"Of course he does. You're supposed to read his mind, you know," said Karen tartly, winning laughter that would have horrified a teenage Sarah. The first time she'd met Jareth, she'd have missed her stepmother's dryly amused affection and bristled with indignation on her father's behalf.

Or maybe she would have raged at him for marrying such a ghastly harridan. She couldn't say; it is a tight fit, for forty to wear fifteen's shoes. Floor cool beneath her feet, she wandered happily into the living room and flopped over the back of the sofa.

"Have you been knitting?"

"Crocheting." Affection leaked through sternness. "I'm working on Jo's present. What's her spider du jour?"

"Wolf spider. She wants one. Passionately."

"Well, I'm not making her a spider. Has she been behaving?"

"More or less. She broke my phone, accidentally…I was going to make her save up to buy my new one, but Amelia convinced me to get a Droid so now she's only paying half."

"Oh dear, how's she doing? Mooched to Andrew yet?"

"Not allowed to mooch, but she's already brought me fifty dollars anyway. I think it's Jareth's fault, but I've no idea how."

"Savings?"

"Doesn't have any."

"Not smart. Is _he_ behaving himself?"

"Not his fault. And yeah, he's been sick the last few days…he's an ass, but Jo likes him." Did her voice leak affection if you listened closely, like Karen's did?

"He sounds," her stepmother told her aridly, "like a nice ass."

"Says you. You haven't met him."

"Do I get to?"

"Karen…." A measure of joy escaped on a quiet sigh. "You know I can't come for the holidays, and I don't plan on keeping him forever."

"Oh, that's too bad. He sounds nice."

She puffed out a breath of exasperation and hoped the noises from the kitchen couldn't hear her stepmother playing matchmaker. Of course he'd choose now to wander downstairs for the first time in days.

"You're just saying that because he annoys me, and you know it."

"Of course. And because Jo likes him."

The noises in the kitchen had stilled; slowly, they resumed as conversation turned to work. Karen, in her late sixties, still worked full-time, not counting seminars and volunteering. Sarah worried, but that, too, had become old hat. Any admission would get a tart inquiry into her own workaholic tendencies during Jo's absences, and they both knew it.

Jareth emerged from the kitchen near the end of their conversation, bearing a mug; Sarah shot him a mutely questioning look, to which he smiled blandly, placed the mug on the end table beside her, and wandered off again. She watched him go while she said her goodbyes and then, closing her eyes, leaned thoughtfully back on the couch. Karen had gone from nemesis to friend, sometimes mentor, occasionally even parental figure; Sarah enjoyed talking with her, both on virtue of that and in pride at the work both of them had done to get there. This conversation, however, had left her restless and longing. Ever since she'd acquired a job with which she could afford to, she'd gone home for the holidays.

When she looked up, Jareth had settled across from her, regarding her quietly over the rim of his own mug. A certain stillness occupied the cast of his face. She did not feel pressed to respond immediately, and instead reached over to pick up her mug and take a deep breath of its aromatic steam. To her surprise, he'd made mulled wine, a winter drink. She took a sip, then, reflecting upon how he wrapped around the warm mug, passed him the toast blanket. He greeted it with a guarded smile, set down the mug and, studiously, cocooned himself in it, while Sarah drank more wine and the amusement within her grew until she blurted, voice permeated with barely concealed laughter, "What did you _do_?"

"The dishes?" He blinked at her, with an entirely un-Jareth-like smile full of disarming innocence. Snickering, she decided to play along. No point in dwelling on the Cleaners.

"Not that, silly."

"I made drinks. Do you not approve?" Almost she might have believed him sincerely, irritably crestfallen. The man _pouted_ at her, and she couldn't help laughing.

"Jocelyn handed me fifty dollars earlier."

"Splendid! The young lady exhibits excellent financial discretion."

Sarah very nearly entertained a stint as a nasal wine fountain.

"She gets five dollars a week and it hasn't even _been_ a week. What did you _do_?"

Disappointment elevated his eyebrows.

"Now now, Sarah," he nearly bit her name into two syllables, as he had when he was king, "I promised not to aid and abet."

"Not going to aid and abet, my ass," she snorted.

The angled brows just about vanished into his hairline. Smugly, he beamed at her.

"Oh, I don't remember saying anything about _that_…"

Sarah at fifteen would have blushed, squeaked and fled; Sarah at sixteen would've flung a pillow at him. Sarah at forty smiled archly.

"Are you implying it needs the help?"

Jareth, grinning into his mug, hadn't the grace to blush.

"No, but a gentleman simply must offer. She has been mowing the neighbours' lawns. Walking their dogs. What-have-you."

My ass? thought Sarah irrationally, still highly amused, while her brain scrambled a hundred eighty degrees back to her original question. As realization dawned, her laughter changed tone completely. He glanced up in surprise at her obvious approval.

"You encouraged her to take odd jobs while I was at work?"

The shut-down came immediately – a subtle, unmistakable shift from hope to resignation. He nodded, expelling a deep breath, no longer meeting her eyes; Sarah felt her conscience twist painfully. Unfolding from the sofa, she gently took his mug and put it on the coffee table – he stared up at her, all worried dread – sat down on the arm of the chair, and took his hand in both of hers.

"Thank you."

His odd eyes scanned her face anxiously while she spoke. Then his expression melted into smug serenity. If she hadn't watched him so closely, she would have missed the fleeting look of raw, pleading relief.

"You're…" His voice faltered as she hugged him, "You're welcome."

This time, he didn't freeze as he had before, but nestled close and wrapped an arm around her. She sighed quietly at the simple pleasure of affection. For once, she wouldn't try to talk herself out of it. His hair, under her hand, felt like rough-spun silk; between the way he leaned into her hand, and the happy humming sigh that echoed hers, she half expected him to purr. Sarah nuzzled into his hair and attempted to reconcile herself with the fact that – at least caught in a good mood – the former Goblin King was _sweet_.

She thought he'd fallen asleep on her. Certainly, drowsiness had settled heavily over her within a few moments, and he certainly had more to be tired about. Either he'd only dozed off slightly, though, or overnight he'd become a rather imaginative sleep-talker. Either way, she missed most of what he said.

"What was that, again? I'm sorry."

"You shall have to introduce me to your…international cobweb…_thingy_."

"Thingy?" she inquired, blinking another sort of cobwebs from her brain; then, suppressing laughter, "_thingy_?"

"Absolutely. Very technical term, far more specific than wotsit and only slightly less so than thinamagig."

"Oooh, fancy! I always thought it was the other way around." Sobering, she folded his hand in hers. "I will teach you to use the internet, though. May I ask why?"

To judge by his voice, he smiled grimly.

"Citizenship papers. The process takes a while, yes?"

"Yes." She nodded pensively and nuzzled into his hair. "I'll go get my computer, okay?"

"All right."

It would have taken willful contrariness to interpret his hesitation to let her go as anything but utmost reluctance. She didn't want to pull away, either, and lingered for a moment; in the doorway, she turned back to watch him. He looked almost mundane in Karen's toast blanket, nursing his mug.

"Jareth?"

"Yes?"

"You're doing well. I'm proud of you."

Before he could make her regret saying that, she slipped off to get her laptop.


End file.
